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Thursday, October 12, 2017

Facebook Ads & Data Collection

As we talked about in class today, Facebook tracks your ad preferences and paints a picture of you. If you want to check out how Facebook has depicted you, visit this link:  https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences

If you click on "Your Information" (third tab), and then click "Your Categories", 


For me, the three I've circled in Purple (US Politics - Moderate, Close friends of expats, and Frequent Travelers) are especially useful for advertisers in creating targeted content that I'll likely find agreeable. 

Facebook also knows your interests and can extrapolate based off your likes. Even likes that don't (on paper) say a lot about me are more revealing than I would think. For example, Facebook tells me that my ads are, in part, based off my "liking" of Sid Meier's Civilization computer game franchise. Liking a simple computer game tells Facebook that I'm interested in strategic games, and am interested in geopolitics.

The algorithms used are not perfect. Facebook can also get your information very wrong. Doing a little more digging, I found that the ad preferences thought I was a smoker and a 9/11 truther. Neither of these are true. Nevertheless, more often than not, the ads we get indicate the trail we leave on social media. Based off my activity, I get ads for LSAT prep, international travel, and classical music.

To the best of my recollection, I did not receive a deluge of Russia-funded Trump ads during the campaign season. That lack of campaign ads could very likely be due to my ad preferences - whoever targets users could look at my profile, assume (correctly) that they'd be wasting their money on me, and target a different user instead. 

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