Welcome to the Tech Meme Right Home for Thursday, September 27th, 2018.

I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Facebook said it didn't target certain data.

Surprise, surprise, researchers later proved that they did.

Amazon doesn't love unions, is the Oculus Quest VR's iPhone moment.

And do ride sharing companies actually make any money?

Here's what you missed today in the world of tech.

So we know that Facebook targets ads against anything you tell it about yourself.

But according to some new academic research, Facebook also lets ads target you using information you never gave it in fact

never could have given it it also targets you using information given to Facebook

ostensibly for security purposes like when you give them your phone

number for two-factor authentication. When Gizamoto asked Facebook about these

practices, which it has termed shadow contact information, the company initially denied it, but if you read the

Gizmodo piece that is the first link in the show notes, it's pretty damning.

It turns out a bunch of researchers at Northeastern University and Princeton did a bunch of tests

involving seating contact information to Facebook for a bunch of dummy accounts and then seeing

if and how long it took before they could target ads against that data.

They found that when a user gives Facebook a phone number for two-factor authentication

or in order to receive alerts about new log-ins to a user's account, phone number became targetable by an

advertiser within a couple of weeks. So users who want their

accounts to be more secure are forced to make a privacy tradeoff and allow

advertisers to more easily find them on the social network.

When asked about this, a Facebook spokesperson said that, quote, we use the information people

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