Friday, April 06, 2018

What's Your Facebook Ad Profile

In the spirit of transparency, Mark Zuckerberg vowed that users would be given more information about how their data is applied and that third party sites would be investigated for how they interact with user information. One of the things that really struck me this week was the ad categorization that Facebook in particular had for me:


While the above was meant to incite trust, I was actually spooked out by the intimacy and accuracy of details that Facebook had drawn about me and my friends. And surprised about the relevance of "Friends of Soccer" or the conclusion that I am very liberal, something that I only learned of while going over my own profile. If you are curious about how your choice of friends and shared posts define you too, please follow the simple steps below:

  1. Settings
  2. Account Settings
  3. Ads
  4. Your Information
  5. Your Categories
This seems very much in line with his interview last month with CNN's tech correspondent, Laurie Segall where he emotionally apologized and promised to do better for the sake of the legacy he wants to leave for his daughters. Strangely enough, this contradicts 2009 interview on BBC where he swore that privacy was central at Facebook as the company celebrated 170 million users. If you're not bothered by the contradictions yet, Techcrunch reported that individuals who have been in communication with Mark Zuckerberg report his part of the conversation being magically deleted while theirs left behind. This comes as Zuckerberg's ethics are being questioned and he's still holding on to the mantle of having good intentions but made a simple mistake.

There is nothing wrong with profit maximization and the ad model at Facebook save for the lies around it. If Facebook could follow the lead of Google and Amazon, two sites that may actually know more about us, and just stopped emphasizing emotionally about how user privacy matters, perhaps this would not be a big deal. There are a million ways to be authentic and when we compare the other two giants in this space, the Cambridge Analytica scandal is a lesson in radical authenticity, something that Facebook had always sworn by but apparently never practiced.


https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/05/zuckerberg-deleted-messages/



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