EFF: A Guided Tour of the Data Facebook Uses to Target Ads
A Guided Tour of the Data Facebook Uses to Target Ads Last week, Pew released the results of a survey investigating how users understand the platform’s data collection practices and how they react when shown what Facebook thinks it knows about them. The upshot is that 74% of users weren’t aware that Facebook assembles lists of their interests and traits. 88% of respondents were assigned “categories” for advertising, which could include racial or ethnic “affinities” and political leanings. 58% of those users were “not comfortable” with the company compiling that information. Essentially, this means that more than half of Facebook’s users are unhappy with the major thrust of the company’s business model—surveillance-based advertising—even after they’ve learned more about the info that the company has gotten from surveilling them. This is unsurprising: just knowing how you’re being tracked doesn’t necessarily make the tracking or the targeted ads less creepy . And while Facebook g...