Mozilla partnered with The Markup to discover how Meta tracks people across the web

Something that everyone knows and that above all the reason that has put Facebook in more than one occasion in Judged In addition to creating great controversies and debates on the web, is that their business model is basically based on collecting data about people online and uses them to personalize content and advertising.

However, until the day today exactly how you do it still a mystery, it is because of that Mozilla partnered with the nonprofit newsroom The Markup in what he calls "Facebook Pixel Hunt", to find out how Meta follows people across the web through its pixel-driven advertising network and what it does with the data it collects.

Rally (a privacy-friendly data sharing platform created by Mozilla last year) and The Markup talk about their collaboration:

In accordance with its own privacy policy, Facebook may collect information about you from the web, even if you do not have a Facebook account. One of the ways that Facebook does this tracking is through a network of pixels that can be installed on many of the sites you visit. By participating in this study, you will help Rally and The Markup to investigate and report on where Facebook follows you and the type of information it collects.

The Facebook Search Study will collect the following data from volunteers:

• Data sent to Facebook pixels while you browse
• The URLs of the web pages you browse
• The time you spend browsing the pages
• The presence of Facebook login cookies in your browser
• A study survey that the user completes
• Metadata on the URLs of your visit: The full URL of each web page you are on
  Time spent browsing and playing media on each web page
  How far down the web page you scrolled

Mozilla wishes to point out that it will not use the collected data for malicious purposes:

» This study will not share granular metric data with third parties. All efforts to aggregate and analyze the data will be done in Mozilla's secure scanning environment. Once the scan is complete, we will remove all raw data. All reporting by The Markup will only use aggregated and anonymous data."

For those who are interested in being able to participate in the projectThey must know that they must have a lot of patience. And for this, these are some steps to follow to participate:

1. First of all, you have to install Rally, the extension that Mozilla offers and that at the moment, the tool due to its great success is only gradually accepting users. Therefore, it will be necessary to go through a waiting list.
2. The next step once accepted is that they must join the Facebook Pixel Hunt project. Once again, there is a waiting list spread over many countries. It should be noted that the study is active until July 13 of this year, so registration is open until that date. It is quite possible to be accepted into the program several weeks after registration.
3. As soon as their profile is validated, they just have to browse the internet as usual. Mozilla and The Markup will retrieve the data that Facebook collects when you are online (URLs of web pages visited, metadata generated, time spent on the page, presence of a Facebook ID cookie, etc.)

Mozilla ensures that only anonymized data will be extracted from the databases thus constituted and that will be used only within the framework of the study. The first results will undoubtedly fall in the early fall of 2022, after the analysis of the teams working on the project.

Finally, for those interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details In the following link.