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Stack Overflow privacy policy states:

Information Shared with Third Parties

We may share personal information with third parties who provide services to Stack Overflow, such as payment processors, email delivery services, and advertising providers. Additionally, to improve user experience, we offer single sign-on solutions for account login and these third parties (including Facebook and Google) may receive information from these services when you elect to use them. When Stack Overflow shares your personal information and other collected information with third party service providers, we require that they use your information only for the purpose of providing services to us and that their terms are consistent with this privacy policy.

But user preferences Activity data (enabled by default) states:

Stack Overflow never sells or shares your activity data with third parties.

We use your on-site activity to show you more relevant content. For example, we might show you questions based on the tags you usually browse, or show you job listings in your current location.

Does Stack Overflow share user activity data with third parties or not?

If so, which personal information and activity data is shared and where can I find detailed information about this?

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  • According to staff replies (in 2016) on meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/318621, they aren't sharing personal information to anyone, and all access to personal information is logged.
    – Samuel Liew Mod
    Commented Aug 2, 2019 at 0:59
  • 10
    @SamuelLiew That 2016 information might be outdated -- the privacy policy was different then. Compare the archived web pages for Stack Exchange, Inc. Privacy Policy from August 11, 2016 and August 1, 2019.
    – jkdev
    Commented Aug 2, 2019 at 4:58
  • 4
    The external avatar hosting means that on many pages your IP address and the pages you visit from it is shared with Facebook, Google and Gravatar. This is not directly connected to your other account data, but I'd suspect that at least Facebook and Google have the means to deanonymize many users based on this information alone.
    – Mad Scientist
    Commented Aug 2, 2019 at 8:45
  • Higher reputation users can access the google analytics. They can theoretically share the data with third parties, but I'm not entirely sure it's not prohibited.
    – user6889435
    Commented Aug 2, 2019 at 13:59
  • @KrzysztofSzewczyk: There isn't a lot of information in there. Just some counters, basically.
    – Cerbrus
    Commented Aug 2, 2019 at 15:06
  • @Cerbrus The title is << Is user activity data shared with third parties? >> Is certailny is, even if you have just counters.
    – user6889435
    Commented Aug 2, 2019 at 16:56
  • That’s “usage” data. Not “user” data, @KrzysztofSzewczyk.
    – Cerbrus
    Commented Aug 2, 2019 at 16:57
  • user activity == usage
    – user6889435
    Commented Aug 2, 2019 at 16:58
  • 3
    @KrzysztofSzewczyk, the analytics data is heavily aggregated. I doubt you could extract anything personally identifiable out of it even on the smaller sites, much less SO.
    – Mark
    Commented Aug 3, 2019 at 2:02
  • @SamuelLiew are you the only moderator around? Where are the rest of the moderators when we need them?!
    – Pedro Lobito
    Commented Aug 4, 2019 at 6:11
  • 1
    Well, this is a question that only Stack Exchange staff can answer, and it's the weekend...
    – Samuel Liew Mod
    Commented Aug 4, 2019 at 10:39
  • @SamuelLiew Thank you for your update, but monday is about to end and mod's or SE staff are no where to be seen. Privacy issues are important and they shouldn't be ignored as they heavily undermine the community trust.
    – Pedro Lobito
    Commented Aug 5, 2019 at 21:44
  • 1
    I'll get an answer to this (thanks @SamuelLiew for bringing it to us). To be clear, you're looking at activity data shared in a non-aggregate, non-anonymized fashion as the primary use case you'd like to know about? I want to make the distinction because data.stackexchange.com exposes some activity of everyone (e.g. voting), it just doesn't correlate to individual users, so I want to be sure I understand your question.
    – user50049
    Commented Aug 6, 2019 at 3:59
  • 1
    @TimPost I'm trying to understand if the statement "Stack Overflow never sells or shares your activity data with third parties" still applies in 2019, but I also would like to know, what type of "non-aggregate/anonymized" data is shared with 3rd parties,
    – Pedro Lobito
    Commented Aug 7, 2019 at 6:04

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