There’s no longer need to have a profile on the social network Facebook for the company to have your data. All it takes is just one click on the iconic Like button of the platform on another website, so that Mark Zuckerberg’s firm receives your information. Information that, in some cases, can be compromising and bring problems if it comes to light.

A study conducted by the Carlos III University reveals that companies that publish advertisements on the social network have the opportunity to select who and how many they want to address through a tag system. And that goes against the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) recently approved in Europe that prohibits saving this type of data and, above all, use it for commercial purposes.

Facebook employs potentially sensitive tags with 67% of its more than 2.2 billion users worldwide. These tags profile their users based on aspects such as their race, ethnicity, ideology, religious belief, information related to their health, union activity or sexual orientation.

In Spain, where Facebook has about 28 million members, the percentage of users that have been profiled this way by the social network rises to 72%, which is equivalent to 20 million people. 43% of the Spanish population. To carry out the research, the authors analyzed the 126,000 labels that Facebook assigned to the 4,500 volunteers who installed a tool to study the practices of the social network.

Of those 126,000 labels, they selected 2,092 “potentially sensitive” for users. Next, they tried to advertise their research tool through Facebook, segmenting users who would see the ad based on those 2,092 tags. The social network did not put any problem.

Facebook has explained that they do not use the personal attributes of users to profile them. What they do, he explains, is to make profiles based on each individual’s interests. And it is evident that one thing and another are separated by a very thin line. For the authors of the study, what happens is that there is a possibility that Facebook has made a correlation between what it means to be something and to be interested in something. Because that would be fine spinning and would allow advertisers to be especially effective in directing their ads. However, it seems that those responsible for this social network have not wanted to offer an answer to this question.