Outside of Google, Acxiom, and probably the US Government, there isn't a entity that tracks more user data more than Facebook. With a company like Acxiom, what they collect and how they use it is fairly transparent to you. You may suddenly start receiving catalogues for certain products at certain times, sometimes eerily so as they almost seem to know what you are thinking.
With Facebook, however, what they learn and know about you, and how they use that data is much more overt. The best part about Facebook's data though, is that not only can you see how you are categorized and viewed, you can manipulate that data.
To find out how Facebook categorizes you as a metric, go to Facebook Ad Preferences.
https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferencesScroll down to interests. Here you will see interest categories based on your likes, posts, shares, and comments. Everything from Family and Relationships, to Health and Wellness, to Politics (under Lifestyle and Culture). The pages and interest categories you see under each of these topics are what Facebook feeds to your timeline first. You can also modify this data. For example, under Health and Wellness, it shows I have an interest category for Running. As I have no actual interest in running, I can remove this interest from my advertising feed simply by clicking the X.
Knowing these ad preferences allow you to actually manipulate not only your own Facebook timeline, but how they categorize and view you as a piece of data.
In addition, below the interest section, you can see which advertisers actually have collected your data and are using it to feed ads to you. This part may be a bit shocking as these advertisers not only are hitting your feed due to generic data, but actually are loading into your feed because they have your contact data.
Once you know how Facebook collects and tracks your data, you can begin to manipulate your data. If you want to be more incognito politically, for example, you can remove political interests from your list and begin to add (through liking pages and commenting on topics) interest data that creates the image you want to project. This way, you are creating your data profile with Facebook versus their simply tracking you and covertly collecting the data.
