The social admits to always tracking the location of its members, even if they have chosen to turn off geolocation. Here's how it does it and why it does it
If you want to protect your privacy, disabling the tracking of your smartphone's location, detected through GPS or mobile and Wi-Fi networks, is not enough. This is said by Facebook itself, which claims to always know where its users connect from and, from the words of the social giant, we can guess that not only Facebook collects this information.
In a letter sent to U.S. senators, who for years have been asking Mark Zuckerberg to account and reason for the policies adopted to protect the data of Americans, Facebook has admitted that it is able to know where each of its users is at any time of day, even if the user has chosen not to share his location. Moreover, according to Facebook's writing to U.S. senators, all this would be good for the user and, paradoxically, for his and his smartphone's security. All this did nothing but throw further fuel on the fire of the controversy against Facebook and how the company manages the personal data of its users.
How does Facebook always know where you are
Even if the user turns off location tracking, Facebook has several ways to know where he is: the first is to read the location information shared by the user himself, who often geolocalizes himself, the second is to track the IP address of the device with which he connects. The latter information is a little less precise than direct tracking, but still enough to know in which area of a city the device, and therefore the user, is located.
Why Facebook tracks our location
Facebook says that continuous location tracking is an advantage for the user. If, out of the blue, someone from Asia connects to a profile of a user who normally lives in America, Europe or anywhere else in the world, Facebook can see that something may be wrong and warn the user.
Is it just Facebook?
It's very unlikely that it's just Facebook that does this. Other Web bigwigs, such as Twitter or Google itself, also send notifications to their users in case of suspicious access from areas of the world other than those already known. And it is equally unlikely that a hacker is accessing our Twitter or Google profile from Thailand has not disabled GPS and keeps location tracking active.