Facebook profiling wide off the mark
A North Carolina State University study shows that Facebook’s targeted advertising can sometimes be more like a wild pitch. The paper ‘Analysing the impact and accuracy of Facebook activity on Facebook’s ad-interest inference process’ included two studies to learn how Facebook generates its interest profiles for users.
Researchers created 14 new user accounts on Facebook in the first experiment and controlled each account’s demographic data and behaviour.
“This first experiment allowed us to see which activities were associated with Facebook inferring an interest,” Sabir says. “And the key finding here is that Facebook takes an aggressive approach to interest inference. Even something as simple as scrolling through a page led to Facebook determining that a user has an interest in that subject. For the 14 accounts we created for this study, we found 33.22 per cent of the inferred interests were inaccurate or irrelevant. We then wanted to see if these findings would hold true for a larger, more diverse group of users, which was the impetus for the second experiment,” Das says.
Researchers recruited 146 study participants from different parts of the world for the second experiment. Participants used a browser extension that allowed researchers to collect data about their interests shared on Facebook. Later, participants reflected on the accuracy of their interests listed on Facebook .
“We found that 29.3 per cent of the interests Facebook had listed for the study participants were actually not of interest,” says Das. “That’s comparable to what we saw in our controlled experiments. We also found that most study participants didn’t even know Facebook’s ad preference manager exists. They didn’t know there was a list of interests they could look at or that Facebook provides at least a basic explanation of why it has assigned a given interest to a user. This is an interesting finding in itself,” Das says.
“The goal of providing all of this information regarding interests is ostensibly to be transparent with users. But given that many users don’t even know this information is available, Facebook is not achieving that goal,” Das concluded.