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How to use your iPhone to see what political affiliation Facebook thinks you have

Facebook stores a significant amount of data on every user, including details about devices and operating systems you've used to access the service, and what political affiliation you may be. Here's how to find out what the world's largest social network knows about you.

Facebook recently opened up its data stores, telling users what data it was collecting on them in an effort to tailor what content and advertisements they see.

They didn't say it would be easy to find, however. Here's how find out what Facebook has gleaned about your political affiliation, and other tidbits about you.

1) Open the Facebook app on your iPhone, and click more.

2) Select "Settings"

3) Select "Account Settings"

4) Scroll down to Ads

5) Choose "Manage the preferences..."

6) Select "Visit ad preferences"

7) Select "More"

8) Select "Lifestyle and Culture"

9) Scroll down to US Politics, and it will tell you how Facebook assumes you will vote, amongst other gleaned information.

According to the New York Times, Facebook gathers political affiliation information based on stated preferences, sites liked, and adjacency. You user adjacency to a political group is measured by the affiliation of other people that visit the same Facebook groups and pages that you do.

The gleaned information that Facebook has should be viewed with a grain of salt. While general terms identified as favored topics for the user — or denotation of the user's preferred operating system — are correct, the political affiliation was misidentified for most of the people we gave the instructions to that did not self-identify as associated with a political affiliation.

Both the Clinton and Trump campaigns are aiming Facebook ad buys at politically moderate-identified individuals.

Of course, targeted ads on Facebook apply to interests that go well beyond political affiliation to include factors such as schools attended, family proximity, favorite celebrities, and much more. Facebook will also target users with ads based on websites they follow, including AppleInsider's official page.