Turning Off Facebook Location Tracking Doesn't Stop It From Tracking Your Location

Even if you explicitly tell Facebook to not track your location, it says it will still use your IP address to track your location. Kashmir Hill, reporting for Gizmodo: Aleksandra Korolova has turned off Facebook's access to her location in every way that she can. She has turned off location history in the Facebook app and told her iPhone that she 'Never' wants the app to get her location. She doesn't 'check-in' to places and doesn't list her current city on her profile.

Despite all this, she constantly sees location-based ads on Facebook. She sees ads targeted at 'people who live near Santa Monica' (where she lives) and at 'people who live or were recently near Los Angeles' (where she works as an assistant professor at the University of Southern California). When she traveled to Glacier National Park, she saw an ad for activities in Montana, and when she went on a work trip to Cambridge, Massachusetts, she saw an ad for a ceramics school there. Facebook was continuing to track Korolova's location for ads despite her signaling in all the ways that she could that she didn't want Facebook doing that.

'There is no way for people to opt out of using location for ads entirely,' said a Facebook spokesperson by email. 'We use city and zip level location which we collect from IP addresses and other information such as check-ins and current city from your profile to ensure we are providing people with a good service -- from ensuring they see Facebook in the right language, to making sure that they are shown nearby events and ads for businesses that are local to them.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.