this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2024
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Huh? How do you think ad targeting works?
"Show my ad to hornly lonely 13 y/o that suffer from Tourette"
vs
"Here is a list of 13 y/o that suffer from Tourette"
One of these options is less profitable for an ad network in the long run.
Did you all forget about Cambridge Analytica?
It's funny how people who get their news exclusively from their Facebook feeds have never heard of Cambridge Analytica. I can't imagine how that could happen.
It has been over 6 years. I guess a lot of users has been too young to care.
An advertiser contacts Facebook and says, 'We’d like to advertise this product to a specific group of people,' and Facebook says, 'Sure, hand us your money and the ad you'd like us to display,' and then targets that ad to the desired audience. At no point does Facebook hand over user data to the advertiser.
For example, if I want to advertise my home renovation services to all the elderly home owners in my city, then what use would it be for me if they just handed me a list of those people? None. They're the advertising platform. It's them who targets those ads.
Except you can add a tracking pixel to the destination website after people click through on the ad, which correlates to people's individual profile. To say that isn't "handing out personal information to others" is sophistry of the highest order.
They're not handing out personal information. If you hide stuff like that in your ad links then you're the malicious actor, not facebook.
You may want to familiarize yourself with how their tracking pixel works. In brief, you add a line of code (provided by Facebook) to any given website and on page load that code displays a 1x1px transparent image from Facebook's servers that allows them to establish a correlation between the loading of that website and the identity of the person logged in to Facebook on that browser. it isn't "hiding" anything or circumventing Facebook in any way. It's a core part of their advertising offerings. https://www.facebook.com/business/goals/retargeting