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Facebook gets data on individual users from many thousands of companies, and a new study<\/a> (PDF<\/a>) from Consumer Reports tried to put more exact numbers on it. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Researchers found that, on average, Facebook received data from 2,230 different companies for each of the 709 volunteers. One extreme example showed that \u201cnearly 48,000 different companies were found in the data of a single volunteer.\u201d In total, Facebook data archives showed that 186,892 companies had provided data on all of the study\u2019s participants. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Volunteers recruited with help from The Markup<\/em><\/a> pulled their personal data from Facebook using its Download Your Information tool and shared it with the researchers. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Companies using Meta\u2019s advertising platform upload customers\u2019 personal information and buying habits, which Meta uses to serve targeted ads to those people or people with similar profiles. The researchers believed that the ease of \u201cmicrotargeting\u201d campaigns to specific user data accounted for the fact that 96,000 of the companies listed were only targeting one of the volunteers. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Ninety-six percent of the study participants\u2019 archives contained information shared by a data broker called LiveRamp, but it wasn\u2019t all data brokers. Large retailers like The Home Depot, Walmart, or Amazon showed up, too, while other smaller businesses were \u201csurprisingly well represented,\u201d such as a car dealership in a 24,665-person town in Texas that covered 10 percent of the study\u2019s volunteers on its own. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Most couldn\u2019t be identified, though, as they used nonsense combinations of characters like \u201cBm 5 100tkqc nlm\u201d or generic names like \u201cViking.\u201d But the name doesn\u2019t really matter, does it? Acxiom, the company that owns LiveRamp, says it can reach<\/a> \u201cover 2.5 billion of the world\u2019s marketable consumers\u201d and boasts about its \u201cability to build a complete view of the consumer for improved consumer recognition.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n