Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, John than Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio. And how the Tech? Are you? A listener whom I will refer to as are twe did in a request. The reason I'm not giving the listener's name is that the request has to do with a privacy breach issue, and just to make sure I don't make a uncomfortable situation even worse, I'm not going to say their name on here, but I will say thank you are for your request. Are wanted to know more about what is now called meta pixel. Formally we would call it Facebook pixel because some of ours personal data became compromised due to an issue with Novant Health which apply misconfigured a pixel tracker, which led to the unintentional sharing of personal patient information with Facebook, which included medical data. That medical data would include stuff like a type of of doctor's appointments someone was searching for, or which physician they selected to see that kind of thing. It didn't auto magically know everything about a patient's medical history. It was more about specific activities having to do with an online tool. So the pixel was meant to track the use of this tool that no Vent had already launched but was really promoting early on during the pandemic. The tool is called my Chart. It's kind of a patient portal tool, and Novent was trying to get more patients to be aware of it and to use it to do things like schedule virtual doctor visits because of course at the time most of us were stuck at home. So the tracking tool was really intended to give feedback to Novent about how it's marketing campaign on Facebook was performing and whether or not it was actually leading to more people making use of the tools. So the intentions were good, it's just it plaid out in a bad way. We'll talk more about that later in this episode. So today we're going to talk about the meta or Facebook pixel, what that is, where it came from, and some of the issues surrounding it. And while I'll mainly be talking about Facebook in this episode when we're talking about the platform used to display ads, pixel is something that also plays a part in other meta platforms like Instagram. But let's let's start off, let's talk about what a pixel with a little P is because obviously meta pixel that pixels and upper case P so lower case P what is that kind of pixel? Normally, when I talk about pixels in tech, i'm talking about the individual units in a digital display that make up the points of light that you see. When we talk about a displays resolution, we're really talking about the number of pixels that are on that display. You measure it by going horizontally so across and vertically up and down the screen. So if I were to talk about Apple's sixteen inch macbuck Pro Retina display, that specific device has a resolution that shows three thousand seventy two pixels across, So it's three thousand seventy two pixels wide and one thousand nine twenty pixels tall. You multiply those two numbers together and you get the total number of pixels that display is capable of showing at one time. For this particular device, that happens to be five million, eight hundred thousand, two hut picks piles uh. In a very general sense, the more pixels you have in a display, the higher resolution it is. Resolution is not the be all, end all of everything, but for a very long time, resolution was like the shorthand way of saying this display is better because the number is bigger. That's what your mainstream customers understand. Bigger number means better tech. It's not always true, but that is kind of like the easy shorthand. Anyway, when I'm talking about pixels, usually these are the sort of things I'm talking about, these little points of light. Either that or I'm talking about a very disappointing film that starred Adam Sandler and Peter Dinglige. But the less said about that pixels the better in my opinion, And in this case, neither of those definitions really apply. The meta pixel, when you really get down to it, isn't truly a pixel at all, or rather, it's not quote unquote just of pixel. It's really a package of code that web masters can incorporate into their own web pages, so it's more like a cookie than an actual pixel. Now, there is a pixel created in this process, at least initially there was, and it's a one by one pixel, So it's a single point on a website, one little point. And usually it's transparent, so you can't actually see it. You're seeing through the pixel to the background, or it's it's coded in position so that it blends right in with the background, so you don't notice a pixel. That makes sense, because otherwise you would have this tiny little point of light that was out of sync with all the other pixels around it, and that would look strange. You might even think that there was something wrong with your display. So there is a pixel involved technically, but the point of lay itself isn't really the important bit. It's the code underneath that matters, all right, So the tracking pixel is more like a cookie. But that raises the question what is a cookie? Right? If you don't know what a cookie is a web cookie, then that that's not a very satisfying explanation. So a web cookie is some data from a website that your web browser will actually store within the browser itself, and the website can then retrieve that data stored in the web browser later on. So let's say that you visit a website and you leave it, and then later on you go back to that website. The site could check to see if your browser already has a cookie from the site, and if it finds the cookie and the data there indicates what you had been doing the last time you were on the website, then the website can customize your experience so that you don't have to retrace your steps. I'll give a very quick, simple example. Let's say you go to an online store and you shop around, and in your shopping you actually add a few things to your online shopping cart, but you don't actually go to the checkout process in the store. Let's say that your session has been interrupted by something you had to shut down and go do something else, uh, that demanded your attention, and you come back later, you come back to your computer and you go back to this website. Well, the cookie in your web browser is what lets the website know that you still have stuff in your virtual shopping cart, so that you don't have to go through the whole thing again, lets you pick up where you left off. And that is a very simple example, but it's a very powerful one because it shows how this little tool makes using the web a seamless experience. In fact, cookies emerged not long after the web. Did you know the web? It only been around for literally a couple of years, and a guy named lou Montouli created the basic web cookie expressly for the purpose of making the web rousing experience as seamless as possible. Because you don't want to have a situation where you have to retrace all your steps every time you go to a website, whether that is logging into the site so that your customer profile is there, or you know, having to pick up where you left off in a search like that. That stuff gets frustrating if you have to redo everything. It would be kind of like if you were reading a book and you got to, you know, a page twenty three, and you had to put the book down, and when you pick the book back up again, instead of having to just go to page twenty three and pick up where you left off, you actually had to start skimming the book from page one until you got to where you had stopped and then read it more. That would be a very frustrating experience. No one would read books. Arguably very few people are reading books now. I'm sure a lot of my listeners are the exception to that, because y'all are awesome. But you get what I'm saying. So you had different kinds of cookies. They were aren't all one size fits sold. There are some major major categories. For example, you had session cookies. These exist only as long as you are visiting the site in question, So This is just while you're on a site. You might be navigating page to page on a single website, and the cookies are tracking you and keeping your your session active so that as you navigate to these different pages, you're still having the seamless experience. But once you leave the site, the session expires, your browser deletes the cookie, and it doesn't you know. Next time you go to the website, you're on a fresh slate. Essentially. Then you have what are called persistent cookies or sometimes they're called tracking cookies. These cookies live perpetually within your web browser. They can't expire sometimes sometimes they don't have an expiration date, and really the only way to clear them is to go through your browser settings and to clear cookies, to delete cookies. Uh, some of you have probably done that, where you've gone through to do things like clear out your cash and delete browsing cookies. These are cookies that can store stuff like your overall browsing habits, and obviously that can become really helpful if you're hoping to learn more about the people who visit your site, like you can actually see what people have been clicking on on your site. By installing and programming in the right kind of cookies, and that can tell you a lot like that can be really valuable information. Not not necessarily just to exploit the data of you know, people their personal information. It could be useful just from a design perspective, right, Like you can look and see, oh, based on the information I'm getting from these cookies, people are gravitating towards these buttons that are on the site, but they're ignoring these others. So maybe I don't need to offer the buttons that everyone's ignoring, or maybe I need to reposition them or redesign them so that people actually use them. So there are legitimate uses for cookies that can help webmasters create better websites, which means people visiting those websites have a better experience. That's a I think an overall benign use of cookies. You can also use them to learn more about the people who visit your site. If you're offering you know, products or services, you can use that information to learn which ones are really popular, which ones are speaking to your audience, and it might tell you that you need to shift your business strategy in order to maximize that effectiveness. You might also be able to learn things about the people that don't directly relate to your website. Maybe through the design of a cookie, you learned that a lot of the people who are visiting your site have of shared love of, say, anime, which could indicate that maybe you should get some anime inspired merchandise in your store. And obviously, if you go down that pathway where you are looking at users behaviors that don't directly relate to your own business, this gets pretty darn creepy, pretty darn fast, and it can really become a privacy concern. But don't worry. When we talk about pixel that's gonna blow all of this out of the water. They go nuclear. So that's your your your typical tracking or persistent cookie. There are also things called super cookies. Sometimes they're called zombie cookies. Uh. These are different from web based cookies. For one thing, you can't delete them by clearing out your cash of cookies in your browser. They don't live there. Super cookies typically come from Internet service providers, and so these are little bits of code that end up tracking user activity. So your I s P knows which websites you visit and how long you're there and where you went from that point. They can actually track you across different browsers and different devices. So let's say you go into incognito or private mode, WELLS still tracking you there too, because you're still connecting to your Internet service provider. Those little data packets are still going to your I s P and telling your I SP what you're up to. So you're in anonymous or incognito mode or whatever it may be called, that's not good enough. Your I s P still knows where you're going. Now, you you can definitely get more protection if you restrict yourself to just using encrypted connections. So these are connections where the sites you visit are using you know, HTTPS. So if you see that little padlock icon and the padlock is closed, that indicates that you're good, that this is an encrypted transaction. So the I s P is getting less information about what you're doing. They can see where you're going, but they can't really see what you're doing. Or you could go a step further and rely on a VPN. Now, this, as far as I know, is not a VbN sponsored show. It may be that someday an ad for a VPN will play against the show, but as of the time of recording, I have no connection to any VPN. I'm not gonna mentioned any specific ones, but VPNs are good tools to have and research them, y'all. If you're gonna use one, make sure that it's a reputable VPN that preferably doesn't hold on to customer information at least for any real length of time. But if you use the VPN, then that will end up kind of letting you bypass this I s P issue because all the I s P will see is that you visited the VPN, and then all other traffic will go through the VPN, so the I s P will be unable to see what you are going where you're visiting. The VPN, however, can see, which is why you want to really research your VPN providers to make sure that you know they're not just acting like an I s P and tracking everything you do through them. All Right, That kind of gives us a overview of what cookies are and their purpose on the web, and pretty early on folks got concerned about cookies, tracking them and gathering information. It's one of the big drivers for the privacy rules in the European Union, the most recent being the g d p R rules. It's why the EU requires websites to request permission to use cookies, and it's supposed to make them not just get consent, but explain why cookies are used and how they are used and how a person's personal information could be used. So that kind of sets the scene. We're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk more about what we used to call Facebook Pixel and how that came to be. But first let's take this break. Okay, we're back. We just talked about cookies. Let's talk about the emergence and evolution of Facebook Pixel or Meta pixel. Now, that tool originally debuted back in so it's been around for nearly a decade. At this point, well before Pixel, Facebook had relied on other advertisising tools. So advertising has long been the way that Facebook has generated revenue. It's just that the strategy for how to do that through advertising has changed. So in the olden days before two thousand seven, we're talking about stuff like good old banner ads with a very select group of advertisers, and that was it. So essentially everyone going to Facebook was seeing the same you know, ads displayed when they would log into their profile and there would be a banner ad along the side or along the top of the page, and that was it. Now, in late two thousand seven, Facebook created an ad strategy that would let any business purchase ads on Facebook. So now it was no longer this select group of partners that Facebook would work with, but rather more businesses. Now. I would say that that decision wasn't just Facebook saying we're limiting ourselves too much. It was that Facebook was growing to a point where other businesses said, this is a valuable place to put ads. It's kind of like choosing to put up a billboard ad along a very busy highway that that's gonna get literally more traffic than if you had that same billboard ad put up against a rarely used back road. Right. Facebook was starting to become a highway, so there was a push to have advertisers, more advertisers put their ads up on Facebook, and in those early days, the main strategy was to put up an ad that would drive Facebook users to go to the associated Businesses Facebook page. So there were business pages that you could visit. They were very much like a Facebook profile, but it was a profile for a business, not for a person, and then you could subscribe to that business you know, you could quote unquote like it is what we would say these days, and that would mean that you were essentially granting permission to the business to publish posts that would appear on your Facebook feed as if the business were one of your friends. Right, This was like opening up a door to serve up ad content to potential customers. But while that was attractive to businesses, that was not nearly as powerful as what would come later. Facebook executives realized that they were sitting on a freaking gold mine. And I don't think this realization was like a sudden thing. I think this was something that gradually came to grasp. So they had this rapidly growing community of users who were on Facebook a lot, and Facebook was getting a ton of insight on what people liked and what they felt were important just by looking at what they were doing on the platform. Right, you just track the behavior on the platform and Facebook and you start to see what kind of things are ending. You know, what people like, what people are responding to. And so Facebook began pouring resources into making more sophisticated ad tools that could leverage this information, because you know, this data is valuable, but you have to do something with it in order to realize that value. Right, you don't magically just make money because the data is valuable, you have to put it to work some way. Facebook's approach was to reach out to advertising companies and say, hey, your clients want an effective ad campaign. That means you have to make sure that you have the right ads showing up in front of the right people, and we can help you do that by giving you access to tools that will help you target ads to the people who are most likely to act on those ads. What's more, we're making a tool that can live on your clients sites, so the end business and keep track of when people act on an ad, including when someone actually makes a purchase based off an ad, so your clients will know that the ads are valuable and thus your service is a valuable service, and they'll stay your client. That was a very powerful sales pitch to the advertising agencies because you know, it's kind of a rising tides situation for three of the parties involved in this, Facebook ad agencies and the end businesses that want to advertise on Facebook, and mostly we're gonna just look at the businesses and Facebook and kind of remove ad agencies from the conversation because they kind of get in the way when we're talking about this, and ultimately, while they serve a very important purpose, uh for the for the purposes of our discussion, we can largely ignore them. So on one end, you have the businesses that we're buying up ads. These companies ultimately want more customers, right, and more sales. That's what they want. That's the whole purpose of marketing is to bring attention and then business to your business, right. So those are the most important elements to them, our customers and more, you know, purchases, so and ads effectiveness is critically important. And if you found out that the ad that you had purchased was not driving customers to your products or services, you'd cut that ad and you might not work with that ad agency again because it's like throwing money away. You want to make sure that the dollars you budget for marketing are returning value, that there is a positive return on investment. So for the advertising companies, those companies that service kind of a go between for businesses and the platforms where the ads will appear. Facebook's pitch was really attractive. The platform's tools would give real time feedback on how well an ad was performing, and which audiences were responding best to the ad, and even insight into the different groups and what they liked and disliked, which would then help advertisers when they were crafting ads in the first place, to make a more effective ad in the future. So this gave advertisers a chance to offer more valuable services to their clients, so again more benefit. As for Facebook, this was like striking oil because the company could demonstrate the effectiveness of this tool, the pixel, and begin to demand higher fees from advertisers because of the proof and how effective the strategy was. Facebook's revenues with skyrocket and considering that almost all of Facebook's revenue, like up to ninety seven point nine according to Statista, anyway, all of that was coming from advertising, like the tiniest percentage we're coming from other sources. So Facebook is a preferred nexus for ads, and advertising strategy is critical for company success. All right, So let's talk about what pixel is beyond some lines of JavaScript code and a one by one point on a website. By the way, JavaScript just benefits to mention this really quickly. JavaScript is a web focused programming language that's in plain text. It essentially determines web page behavior, so you can use JavaScript to to uh create specific behaviors on web pages based on user interactions. JavaScript is not related to the programming language that's called Java, which is admittedly a very confusing thing. Java and JavaScript are not related at all. Java is a programming language that has to be compiled. JavaScript isn't because it's a plain text programming or scripting language. Anyway, no need to go into all of that now. I just felt like it's always good to mention it because it's something I get hung up on occasionally. I keep I have, in the best made the blunder of referring to something that was written in JavaScript as being written in Java, and the two cannot be. You know, they're not the same thing. You should not confuse the two now. Originally, Facebook introduced a few different pixel tools and most of which have kind of merged into a single tool today. So there was the website custom Audience pixel and the Facebook Conversion pixel, and these tools were meant to provide a connection. So it was acting like a link between Facebook and the end business that was advertising on Facebook, and it was a two way communications link between the two parties. Here's how the idea would manifest. You would have a website they would enter into the pixel program. As part of that, they would insert this JavaScript code into their web code, which would insert the pixel into the website for the business. So now this pixel component is an integrated component within the target business and links back to Facebook. So you have a user on Facebook. Let's say you're on Facebook and you're browsing through your Facebook feed and you come across an ad that shows this really cute puppy dog leash, and you know that leash is going to look amazing with your beloved puppers. So you click on the ad and it takes you to the corresponding businesses shopping page for the leash. Maybe you actually add the leash to your online shopping cart, maybe you go so far as to purchase the leash. Now, in the old days, Facebook would be able to tell that you had clicked on the ad, but that would be it. That's all they would know. They knew that you clicked on the ad and you went to the page. What happened after that would have been a mystery. But because this particular business had installed the pixel within its web code, it can actually send data back to Facebook that not only did you visit the page, it could include everything else you did once you got to the page, including stuff like adding the leash to your cart or even purchasing it. Well, let's look at this same scenario, but let's reverse things a little bit. Let's say instead of you seeing an ad on Facebook, you open up your web browser and you're just shopping for a new dog leash. You're looking for a new leash for your dog, and your search takes you to this business. And you look at the listings for leashes on this business and you see this super cute doggie leash. Maybe you even click on it and add it to your online cart, but you leave the site without actually making the purchase. You you haven't really decided to pull the trigger yet, so you exit your browsing session. But this business has installed a meta pixel on its web page, right, So the code in the background on this business is web page notes that you've visited, and that it sees that you spent time on the site, that you browsed through it that you visited the the page for this particular leash, and you know the fact that you even put that leash in your online cart, but you didn't seal the deal, you didn't buy it, and through pixel it sends that data to Facebook. So Facebook gets the information about your visit to this business. Even though you didn't come to the business from Facebook itself, you naturally arrived at the business through your housing, through your searching. Right well, Facebook notices that this particular data relates to you, you know, a Facebook user, and that means that Facebook can now start serving up targeted ads for this business to you through your Facebook feed, which it's essentially reminding you about that adorable leash you saw and probably the fact that you could still buy it you just hopped on over to the business. So not only can Facebook provide valuable information about which ads on the platform are effective for specific users, Facebook can also offer to serve up ads to users who have already demonstrated an interest in the business. So, in other words, like a business, the's double value, right, they see value by being able to see how well their ads are performing on Facebook, but also they can have their ads that are in Facebook's database served up to users who had already visited the business independently. That is an enormous benefit. Like if the commercials on your television, know what shops you've been visiting, and can send you ads that relate to those shops. That would be transformational for the TV advertising business. It's also kind of something that's being talked about in smart TV circles, but it's already happening on the web. And another huge benefit from Facebook to these businesses is that Facebook is analyzing user behavior across more than a billion users worldwide. Right, that's a huge amount of information about user activity and preferences. So as data flows back from browser activity prompted by these pixel links between Facebook and businesses, Facebook can analyze the types of ads that are more effective than others. Which ones actually prompt people to go and visit a business, which ones go even a step further and convince people to purchase goods and services. This is what we call a conversion in the ad biz. It converts someone from being a browser to an actual customer. The information itself by itself has value, as it can mean the advertising strategies can be adjusted and evolved to become more effective over time. Plus, Facebook can dynamically target users who are more likely to respond positively to a specific type of advertisement. Now this type of data feedback loop continues to benefit all the parties involved. Well, I mean, you could argue that users are kind of left out of this discussion, right, like we the individual users who go to Facebook don't necessarily benefit so much from this all. You could argue that with this approach, you're theoretically going to at least encounter ads that are more relevant and interesting to you, So you could say that that's a benefit. But otherwise, we are of the product that's being exploited here. So Facebook was uncovering a really uncomfortable truth about all of us, and that's the fact that we're not maybe as special and unique as we like to think we are. I'm not judging you, by the way. I'm sure that you, the person listening to this, you are an amazing person. You've got quirks and you've got traits, You've got all these things that make you you, and you're the only you out there. But the truth of the matter is that when you start to accumulate data about more than a billion users, you're bound to start seeing some patterns emerge, and those patterns create what Facebook calls look alike audiences, meaning that Facebook could identify populations of users who are most likely to respond to specific products or specific messaging, because what they would do is they would say, this person here has responded positively to an AD, whether that's by clicking on it or actually going and becoming a conversion. Right, they can say that person marks a positive experience for that AD. We have analyzed that person's behavior, and we have identified all these other people who share similar qualities to that in this one particular arena, this very niche case. And by serving up the AD to that audience of people who have these similar traits, we have a higher likelihood of that AD having more positive responses. So that means that you could be more of a you could give more of a guarantee to your businesses that the right AD is going to go to the right people at the right time. And Facebook transformed online advertising, or at least it kicked it up a big old notch, because there are other companies that are doing very similar things, like Google is another example. All Right, we're gonna take another break. When we come back, I'm going to talk about another thing that was happening at the same time as the pixel debuting and how that became another important element with Facebook's advertising strategy. But first this break. Before the break, I alluded to the fact that something else was going on around the same time that the pixel was debuting, and that was the mobile revolution. By that, I mean that by two thousand thirteen, the smartphone was firmly established as a popular device, and more people were using smartphones to interact with the web. That was transforming the web itself. You want to talk about disruption, smartphones disrupted the web. Web page administrators were scrambling to optimize their sites for the mobile experience. If your audience has turned to mobile devices in order to access the web, it only makes sense to cater to that audience, or else you risk losing it. I saw that firsthand over at How Stuff Works as we tried to figure out the best way to remain elevant while still writing heavily researched articles. This was an uncertain time. In general. It was filled with experimentation across the web, as content creators were testing out different approaches, from creating more short form content designed to be consumed in little bites, to an over reliance on video content. In fact, we could do a whole episode on the mistakes that various sites and businesses made in an effort to stay relevant or to capture attention during this transition to the mobile web. Everything from Whimby to entire newsrooms getting gutted in favor of small and frankly criminally overworked teams of video producers. Full of that springs to mind, But the reason I bring it up here is that Facebook was able to unify the desktop and mobile experience when it comes to add customers. Because these sites, because they were connected to Facebook through pixels, and because users were connected to their Facebook accounts across multiple platforms like computers and smartphones, Facebook and its advertisers could track users even when those users were switching from one device to another. Because of this underlying connection to Facebook, both the businesses had it and the users had it. So here's another simple but very effective example. Let's say I'm on my phone on my Facebook app and I see that ad for a dog leash, and I tap on the ad using my phone and I look at the leash more closely. But let's say I don't do anything at the time other than that, and then later on I'm on my laptop and I'm working away and Facebook knows that I clicked on that ad in the mobile version, and that furthermore, it knows because of pixel that I didn't go any further than just looking at the leash. Maybe I've just forgotten about it, right. So let's say I'm on my laptop and I go to check my Facebook profile and I encounter the ad on my lad top profile, not my mobile one, or maybe a different ad, but it still features that leash, and that reminds me of that thing I was interested in but didn't actually purchase, and now maybe I will purchase it. My experience has tracked across devices from smartphones to laptop, and it can go the other way as well. So again, like maybe I'm on my phone and I'm browsing this shop and I see this leash, and then later I'm on my laptop and I go to my Facebook profile and there's the ad for the leash. So let's say you really want to deck out your home for Halloween. This is another great example because it's something that I can relate to because I like Halloween, My partner loves Halloween. We have friends who obsess over Halloween, and so we frequently are trying to come up with fun ways to decorate for Halloween, and so we will search for Halloween decorations and other content that relates to Halloween. Now, Facebook doesn't know what I'm searching for on Google, right, It can't see the things that I'm searching for. However, because at least some of the sites I visit happen to have pixel incorporated into them. There's this invisible Facebook presence there. I don't I don't, no, automatically it's there because I can't see it, right, this little transparent pixel. I don't know that it's there, but it is, and that pixel cookie is collecting information about my visit and sends that to Facebook. So then the next time I popped into Facebook, I would see an awful lot of Halloween themed ads popping up in my feed. And you know, maybe I would assume that part of the reason for that is just because we're approaching the holiday. I mean, I don't know when you start seeing Halloween ads, but August is become a pretty common for me, sometimes even in July, and so everyone is probably seeing at least some uptick in Halloween content. So you could say, all right, well, this is just because it's seasonal, But really the reason is because Facebook knows what I've been looking at. It knows what sites have been going to and what I've been browsing, and so Facebook has catered the ads that I see to be more likely to appeal to me and to get me to act on those ads. And this is dynamic obviously, so I'm not suggesting that from this moment forward, I will only get Halloween content. Instead, I would be likely to see stuff relating to whatever it is I've been browsing around that time. This is why you sometimes get that weird feeling that Facebook is spying on you. Like if you've been independently shopping for shoes online and then you notice that when you go to Facebook all your ads are relating to shoes, you might think Facebook's peeping on you, and it is kind of And the reason for that is because the sites you've been shopping on have pixel incorporated into them. So Facebook knows what you're shopping for because of these behind the scenes agreements with these stores, and it's more likely to happen as you visit online shops. But even other types of sites can have pixel installed within them. So while we mostly are thinking about like online stores or companies that offer a specific service. You can sometimes find Pixel installed on things that you wouldn't immediately associate with commerce. So this means that if your job is to, I don't know, research various stuff online in order to make a podcast, your Facebook feed ads might reflect that and show you lots of ads that you're not actually interested in, but somehow relate back to whatever it was you were researching. Uh. I mean, I guess that I actually haven't visited Facebook in a really long time, so I can't say that for sure from a first person perspective, but it is the sort of thing that I noticed occasionally. So again, the pixel tool works in both directions. It's like installing a tiny little spy in every store, and it's well every store that opts to work with Facebook in this way. So the stores want the spy there because the spy knows which Facebook users have visited the store, it can reinforce the store's presence by feeding ads for the store to those users whenever they're on Facebook. Facebook wants the spy there because it helps the platform make its tools more effective, and if they're more effective, then they are more valuable to customers, which means Facebook can charge more money for them. Now, I know it sounds like I'm saying the same thing over and over, but I really wanted to drive all this home to explain how this system works and how your information factors into it. Now, when a business chooses to use Pixel, they actually have options when it comes to the types of information it will share with Facebook and how Facebook should treat ads for the business. For example, the lookalike audience tool is an option you can choose. You don't have to use it. So with a lookalike audience tool, Facebook will pull information from the business's website. It will look from matches and Facebook's profiles for users who have visited that business, and then search for other our profiles that shows similarity with the users who have actively visited the business and serve them the ad in order to increase the scope the reach of this business. This brings us to no Vent. So that was the the health care business I was talking about the top of this show. No Vent has this web based portal tool called my Chart. In May of Novent pushed out a marketing campaign on Facebook to raise patient awareness of my Chart, with the hopes of providing services to more patients who otherwise were isolated due to the pandemic. So no Vent entered into the Pixel program so that it could track the performance of the the campaign on Facebook, presumably also tracking the performance of the tool itself in order to get more insight onto what was working in what needed to be tweaked, and all of that makes sense, But the problem was that the way no Vent had configured its Pixel agreement meant that Facebook was getting more information about patients then was intended. No Vent issued a statement about this whole thing, and it sounds to me like the company wasn't really fully aware of the two way nature of this arrangement with Pixel. Maybe that's an unfair assumption. I'm just drawing it based upon the statement itself. But anyway, people who visited Novent's site where Pixel was installed, or people who used related services where no Vent was ultimately offering the services but wasn't necessarily the the the entity in the forefront things like scheduling a vaccine, well, inadvertently, these people were sharing their personal information, including their activities relating to healthcare, with Facebook. No Vent sent out alerts to affected users, including folks who weren't even aware that they were Novant customers because again they were doing stuff like scheduling a vaccination through an affiliate, but they weren't directly dealing with NOVN, or at least they weren't knowingly directly dealing with NOVN, and they would get these notifications. And it also included people like our who was the one who wrote to me in the first place, who don't have Facebook profiles, because again, the information was sent to Facebook that related to people who were active on this Novent page, whether they were Facebook users or not. So you didn't have to have a profile for you to be affected. Now, even in the US, where privacy laws are pretty darn pathetic, we still have strict standards when it comes to medical data, and so no Vent was trying to get ahead of this and offering services like credit monitoring to certain affected folks. Now, according to no Vent, the vast majority of people who are affected by this, they didn't have information like their Social Security number or any other financial info leaked that that was not part of these uh these these transmissions, but the statement implies that at least in a few cases that did happen, which is a big old yikes. Now, Novents stressed that meta had shown no sign of having inappropriately used this information, and that while this was an improper example of sharing information like private and sensitive data, it didn't go any further than that, at least according to the statement. But there are some developing class action lawsuits that are aimed at Facebook and some hospitals that indicate that this is not always the case. It may be the case with Novent, it may be that Facebook did not act in properly with the data beyond the fact that it received data it shouldn't have. But in other cases, at least according to allegations in lawsuits, other things have developed. So in early August of this year, two for those listening from the future, two different proposed class action lawsuits alleged that Facebook and certain U S hospitals had violated patient privacy laws through pick full So. The lawsuits claim that a lot of hospitals, in fact, thirty three of the top one hospitals in the United States according to the markup, had inserted meta pixel into their hospital websites, and that at seven of those hospitals that installation happened on password protected patient portals, which is a lot of alliteration. And also it sounds not good with a capital in in a capital G. And since Pixel can track user activity such as which options a user clicks on as they navigate a patient portal where Pixel has been installed, that means Facebook was gathering up data relating to people's health conditions. So one lawsuit alleges that a patient, after using her hospital's portal, visited her Facebook profile and saw that the ads that she was encountering in her profile all related to her medical conditions. Now that is a huge problem if it is true, because not only is Facebook receiving sensitive medical information which it already should not be doing, it is then acting on the information in order to profit from it, which it absolutely shouldn't be doing. That's a big old you and raises tons of ethical concerns. Now, when it comes to placing blame for this, you can point fingers both at Facebook slash Meta and at the hospitals which the lawsuits are doing. Meta says that it's really the responsibility of Pixel customers to ensure that they have the right to share the information that they're going to send to Meta. That Meta is not responsible for the info that a endpoint shares with them because they're they're not in control of that. That's the collection point, and it should be at the collection point where the end business makes certain it's only electing the information it is legally allowed to share with Meta, which kind of makes sense, right, And then Meta also says that it actively filters out sensitive health data. Now, the lawsuit says that this is mostly posturing on Meta's part, and that Meta has failed to enforce its own policies, and that even allowing Pixel to be on healthcare websites, even for for Meta to market Pixel to healthcare companies, shows that Meta is not taking a responsible and in this case, legal stance when it comes to sensitive health data. The lawsuit also names the hospitals as defendants, which I add here because I think it's only fair that we not let hospitals off the hook. It's not like the hospitals were forced to use Pixel, and I think you can make a very strong argument that the hospitals have the obligation to research Pixel thoroughly and to ensure that their use of the tool would not compromise patient data, and clearly that did not happen. Assuming that the allegations and these proposed lawsuits are accurate, of course, if it turns out these allegations are baseless, then maybe the hospitals did their due diligence and that's great, but according to these lawsuits, that did not happen. Alright. So let's say your Facebook user and you do not want those personalized ads popping up whenever you visit Facebook because you think it's creepy. Well, you can actually choose to change your off Facebook activity in your user settings. You can go into your user settings, find off Facebook activity, and you can turn those targeted ads off. So doing that means that Facebook is no longer going to serve you ads based upon your browsing behaviors, which is great, right, except it's not totally great because Facebook is still completely tracking you. The tracking is still happening, you're just not seeing the ads based off of it. So it's not gonna serve you up ads based on the information it's tracking. But the proliferation of meta pixel across the web means that frequently your browsing behavior is just being logged and sent to Facebook anyway, and so it's building up a profile on you, even if it can't act directly on that within the Facebook experience. So if you have a Facebook account, and if you're not browsing in incognito mode and maybe using a VPN, chances are Facebook is able to link your behavior to you the person. Now, if you are browsing in incognito and through a VPN, Facebook is probably not going to figure out it's you. The company will have a data point that someone went to this website and did something, but I won't know that that someone was you. But then it's hard to do useful stuff when you're going pure incognito and VPN. When it comes to commerce, it gets tricky. Then. Now, you're also going to still see ads on Facebook if you opt out of this off Facebook tracking activity is just that the ads won't be targeted to you. So you could argue that the only thing that really changes is that you're not confronted with your browsing activities through your ad experience on Facebook. But everything else remains the same. All Right. That was it for Meta Slash Facebook Pixel. I hope you enjoyed that. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, reach out to me. 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