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Last week, I posted an ad on Facebook for a computer teacher named Alan Mislove. Mislove studies how social privacy works and thinks that Facebook allows advertisers to reach users with surprisingly collected contact information. I helped him test the theory by targeting it the way Facebook had already told me. I asked that the ad be broadcast on a Facebook account connected to Alan Mislove's landline number, a number that Mislove never provided to Facebook. He saw the advertisement in a few hours.
One of the many ways in which ads are placed in front of your eyes on Facebook and Instagram is that the social networking giant allows an advertiser to download a list of phone numbers or e-mail addresses that are available. he has in his files. he will then place an ad in front of the accounts associated with this contact information. A clothing retailer may put an advertisement for a dress in the Instagram feeds of women who have previously purchased it, a politician may place Facebook ads in front of anyone on his mailing list, or a casino may offer offers suspected of having a gambling addiction. Facebook calls this a "tailor-made audience".
You can assume that you can access your Facebook profile and view your "Contact and Basic Information" page to see which email addresses and phone numbers are associated with your account, and therefore what advertisers can use for you. target. But as is so often the case when this highly efficient data specialist poses to keep in touch with your friends, this is a less transparent and more pervasive way.
Facebook does not just use the contact information you have voluntarily inserted into your Facebook profile for advertising. It also uses contact information that you have submitted for security reasons and contact information that you have not submitted at all, but that have been collected in other people's contact books, a hidden layer of details that Facebook has on you. "Shadow of contact information." I managed to place an ad in front of Alan Mislove by targeting his shadow profile. This means that the junk e-mail address you are transferring for discounts or for questionable online purchases is probably associated with your account and used to target you with ads.
Facebook does not just use the contact information you have voluntarily inserted into your Facebook profile for advertising. You also use the contact information you submitted for security reasons and the contact information you did not submit at all.
Facebook is not aware of this practice. In fact, last year, I asked her PR team if she was using hidden contact information for ads. Fortunately for those of us obsessed with The incredibly accurate nature of advertisements on Facebook platforms, a group of university researchers decided to delve deeply into how Facebook personalized audiences are trying to understand how phone numbers and email addresses of users are absorbed into the advertising ecosystem.
Giridhari Venkatadri, Piotr Sapiezynski and Alan Mislove of Northeastern University, as well as Elena Lucherini of Princeton University, conducted a series of tests of transmitting contact information to Facebook for a group of test accounts in different ways. . to be used by an advertiser. They found a new way to detect if this information was available to advertisers by consulting the statistics provided by Facebook regarding the size of the audience after downloading contact information. They deepen this question and detail the technical details of their article.
They found that when a user gives Facebook a phone number for two-factor authentication or to receive alerts regarding new connections to a user account, that phone number may be targeted by a advertiser in a few weeks. Thus, users who want their accounts to be more secure are forced to compromise on privacy and allow advertisers to find them more easily on the social network. When asked about this, a Facebook spokesperson said that "we use the information provided to provide a more personalized experience, including more relevant ads." She said users can set up two-factor authentication without using their phone numbers. Facebook has stopped making a phone number for two-factor authentication four months ago.
The researchers also found that if user A, whom we will call Anna, would share her contacts with Facebook, including a previously unknown phone number for user B, which we'll call Ben, advertisers will be able to target Ben with an ad using this phone number, which I call "hidden contact information" about a month later. Ben can not access his details because it would violate Anna's privacy, according to Facebook, so he can not see or delete it, nor can he prevent advertisers from using it.
The main author of the newspaper, Giridhari Venkatadri, said that it was the most surprising result, namely that Facebook was a targeted advertisement using information "that was not directly provided by the company". 39; user or even revealed to the user '.
I have tried to make sure that Facebook discloses contact information to users for almost a year. But it has even refused to disclose these hidden details to users in Europe, where the law on privacy protection is stricter and explicitly requires companies to indicate to users the data they have. A resident of the United Kingdom named Rob Blackie asks Facebook to send his contact information for months, but Facebook told him that it was part of the "confidential" algorithms and "we are not able to give you specific details . "
"People have their address books," said a Facebook spokesperson by e-mail. "We understand that in some cases it may mean that another person is not able to control the contact information that someone else downloads about them."
To test the search for information in the shadow, the researchers tried a real test. They downloaded a list of hundreds of landline numbers from Northeastern University. These are numbers that people working for Northeastern are unlikely to add to their accounts, but it is very likely that the numbers are in the address books of people who know them and have uploaded them to Facebook. . "The researchers found that many of these numbers could be targeted by ads and that they had launched an ad campaign in the information published in Mislove's Facebook feed, whose landline had been included in the file; I confirmed it with my own test targeting his landline number.
"It is likely that the announcement of the announcement was broadcast because another person has downloaded his contact information via the importer of contacts," confirmed a spokesman for Facebook when I informed him of the experience.
Facebook did not dispute any of the researchers' findings. "We describe the information we receive and use for the ads in our data policy and give people control over their advertising experience, including personalized audiences, through their advertising preferences," said an email spokesperson. . "For more information on managing your preferences and the type of data we use to display ads, see this publication."
In this post, "Difficult questions: what information do Facebook advertisers know?", Facebook vice president of advertising Rob Goldman explains how advertising works on Facebook and what you can do if the ads. The post does not mention the surprising collection or use of contact information for targeted advertising that researchers have discovered.
"I think many users do not fully understand how ad targeting works: Advertisers can literally specify exactly which users should see their ads by downloading email addresses, phone numbers, names and birth dates, and so on. . "By describing this work to colleagues, many computer scientists were surprised by this situation and were even more surprised to learn that not only Facebook, but also Google, Pinterest and Twitter all offer related services. Therefore, we believe that it is essential to make users aware of exactly how targeted advertising works on these platforms. "
Although Facebook is not aware of the contact information it uses for ads, it is clear that advertisers have access to it. Facebook's "Ad Preferences" page has a section dedicated to "advertisers with whom you have interacted," which will show you which advertisers have put you in their contact list. My own list contains over 300 advertisers, few of whom I remember consciously giving my contact information – but if I did, it would probably have been an unwanted email address. Mislove says that Facebook could be much more transparent here:
"Facebook could also reveal to users which [personal information] been used to target the delivered ad, helping users understand how their [information] is used by advertisers, "said Mislove by email. In other words, Facebook could tell me which e-mail address or which phone number all these advertisers have on me. With the involvement of shadow contact information, Facebook may be avoiding this because it does not want me to know what personal information Facebook on me
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There are certainly frightening practices in the advertising industry, but it is disturbing that this is happening at Facebook because of its representations about the ability to control your advertising experience. It is worrying that Facebook is reducing the privacy of people who want their accounts to be more secure by using the information they provide for this purpose to retrieve ads. And it is also disturbing to discover another way to use hidden contact information, beyond the recommendations of friends, since Facebook does not allow users to see this information or to let them delete it.
Mislove believes that Facebook can make its platform more transparent by telling users what it knows about it, including all the contact information collected from various sources, and how that information is used. He suggests that Facebook allow users to see all the data they have, then let them specify if they are correct and advertisers can use it.
Facebook claims that users already have extensive control over the information made available to advertisers, but that's not entirely true. Last year, when I asked the company if she was using hidden contact information for ads, it gave me inaccurate information and she did not highlight the practice in her many messages to users about ads. It took months for academic researchers to test the truth. People are becoming more paranoid about the frightening accuracy of the ads they see online and do not understand where the information that leads to that accuracy comes from. Regarding this practice, it seems that Facebook wants to keep its users in the dark.
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