98 personal data points that Facebook uses to target ads to you
98 personal data points that Facebook uses to target ads
to you
By Caitlin Dewey August 19
Say you’re scrolling through your Facebook Newsfeed and
you encounter an ad so eerily well-suited, it seems someone has possibly read
your brain.
Maybe your mother’s birthday is coming up, and Facebook’s
showing ads for her local florist. Or maybe you just made a joke aloud about
wanting a Jeep, and Instagram’s promoting Chrysler dealerships.
Whatever the subject, you’ve seen ads like this. You’ve wondered
— maybe worried — how they found their way to you.
Facebook, in its omniscience, knows that you’re wondering
— and it would like to reassure you. The social network just revamped its ad preference
settings to make them significantly easier for users to understand. They’ve
also launched a new ad education portal, which explains, in general terms, how
Facebook targets ads.
“We want the ads people see on Facebook to be
interesting, useful and relevant,” a Facebook spokesperson said.
But it remains to be seen whether users are pleased or
frightened by the new information they suddenly have.
Targeting options for Facebook advertisers*
1. Location
2. Age
3. Generation
4. Gender
5. Language
6. Education level
7. Field of study
8. School
9. Ethnic affinity
10. Income and net worth
11. Home ownership and type
12. Home value
13. Property size
14. Square footage of home
15. Year home was built
16. Household composition
*Not even conclusive!
As explained on that shiny new portal, Facebook keeps ads
“useful and relevant” in four distinct ways. It tracks your on-site activity,
such as the pages you like and the ads you click, and your device and location
settings, such as the brand of phone you use and your type of Internet
connection. Most users recognize these things impact ad targeting: Facebook has
repeatedly said as much. But slightly more surprising is the extent of
Facebook’s web-tracking efforts and its collaborations with major data brokers.
While you’re logged onto Facebook, for instance, the
network can see virtually every other website you visit. Even when you’re
logged off, Facebook knows much of your browsing: It’s alerted every time you
load a page with a “Like” or “share” button, or an advertisement sourced from
its Atlas network. Facebook also provides publishers with a piece of code,
called Facebook Pixel, that they (and by extension, Facebook) can use to log
their Facebook-using visitors.
17. Users who have an anniversary within 30 days
18. Users who are away from family or hometown
19. Users who are friends with someone who has an
anniversary, is newly married or engaged, recently moved, or has an upcoming
birthday
20. Users in long-distance relationships
21. Users in new relationships
22. Users who have new jobs
23. Users who are newly engaged
24. Users who are newly married
25. Users who have recently moved
26. Users who have birthdays soon
27. Parents
28. Expectant parents
29. Mothers, divided by “type” (soccer, trendy, etc.)
30. Users who are likely to engage in politics
31. Conservatives and liberals
32. Relationship status
On top of that, Facebook offers marketers the option to
target ads according to data compiled by firms like Experian, Acxiom and
Epsilon, which have historically fueled mailing lists and other sorts of
offline efforts. These firms build their profiles over a period of years,
gathering data from government and public records, consumer contests,
warranties and surveys, and private commercial sources — like loyalty card
purchase histories or magazine subscription lists. Whatever they gather from
those searches can also be fed into a model to draw further conclusions, like
whether you’re likely to be an investor or buy organic for your kids.
When combined with the information you’ve already given
Facebook, through your profile and your clicks, you end up with what is
arguably the most complete consumer profile on earth: a snapshot not only of
your Facebook activity, but your behaviors elsewhere in the online (and
offline!) worlds.
33. Employer
34. Industry
35. Job title
36. Office type
37. Interests
38. Users who own motorcycles
39. Users who plan to buy a car (and what kind/brand of
car, and how soon)
40. Users who bought auto parts or accessories recently
41. Users who are likely to need auto parts or services
42. Style and brand of car you drive
43. Year car was bought
44. Age of car
45. How much money user is likely to spend on next car
46. Where user is likely to buy next car
47. How many employees your company has
48. Users who own small businesses
49. Users who work in management or are executives
These snapshots are frequently incomplete and flawed, we
should note — after all, they rely on lots of assumptions. But generally
speaking, they’re good enough to have made Facebook an advertising giant. In
the second quarter of 2016, the company made $6.4 billion in advertising, a
number that’s up 63 percent from the year before. And now, Facebook ads aren’t
only on Facebook.com and its acquired apps — they also populate an external
Audience Network.
“Speaking as both a consumer and as an advertiser, I
think that Facebook’s ad capabilities make internet advertising a better
experience overall,” said Kane Jamison, a Seattle-based marketer who has
written about his experience with Facebook ads. “The majority of promoted
topics that I see in my Facebook feed are relevant to my interests, and they’re
worth clicking on more often.”
Not everyone is quite so convinced that Facebook’s
targeting methods are benevolent, though. Peter Eckersley, the chief computer
scientist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, calls them “the most invasive
in the world.”
Yes, he acknowledges, many companies use data brokers to
make direct-mail lists, and almost every website utilizes some kind of tracker
or cookies — but no company on earth, save Facebook, bundles all that
information.
50. Users who have donated to charity (divided by type)
51. Operating system
52. Users who play canvas games
53. Users who own a gaming console
54. Users who have created a Facebook event
55. Users who have used Facebook Payments
56. Users who have spent more than average on Facebook
Payments
57. Users who administer a Facebook page
58. Users who have recently uploaded photos to Facebook
59. Internet browser
60. Email service
61. Early/late adopters of technology
62. Expats (divided by what country they are from
originally)
63. Users who belong to a credit union, national bank or
regional bank
64. Users who investor (divided by investment type)
65. Number of credit lines
Take the example of the ad for your mother’s local
florist: that might have been targeted to women from your hometown (which
you’ve told Facebook) whose mothers’ birthdays are coming up (that’s in your
Facebook calendar), who live away from family (based on off-site activity) and
who have a high estimated income (according to Acxiom).
Or the mystery of the spoken Jeep joke and displayed the
car ad — an adjacency that actually happened on local Florida TV, convincing
one newscaster that Facebook “eavesdropped” on her. Facebook actually sources
data from IHS Automotive, an industry intelligence firm used widely by dealers,
banks and financial analysts, and doesn’t need eavesdropping to know that your
car’s 10 years old and you might be back in the auto market.
“Facebook’s business model is to amass as much
first-party and third-party data on you as possible, and slowly dole out access
to it,” Eckersley said. “If you’re using Facebook, you’re entrusting the
company with records of everything you do. I think people have reason to be
concerned about that.”
66. Users who are active credit card users
67. Credit card type
68. Users who have a debit card
69. Users who carry a balance on their credit card
70. Users who listen to the radio
71. Preference in TV shows
72. Users who use a mobile device (divided by what brand
they use)
73. Internet connection type
74. Users who recently acquired a smartphone or tablet
75. Users who access the Internet through a smartphone or
tablet
76. Users who use coupons
77. Types of clothing user’s household buys
78. Time of year user’s household shops most
79. Users who are “heavy” buyers of beer, wine or spirits
80. Users who buy groceries (and what kinds)
81. Users who buy beauty products
82. Users who buy allergy medications, cough/cold
medications, pain relief products, and over-the-counter meds
Eckersley’s main concern is how much consumers know about
all this tracking — and how much they’re able to opt out of it. Facebook says
it’s been transparent on both counts, and that the revamped ad preferences
dashboard, as well as the long-standing “Why Am I Seeing This Ad?’ dropdown, is
only the latest proof that it’s dedicated to user privacy.
But while both the dashboard and the dropdown will rid
you of ads you don’t like, neither actually lets users opt out completely of
any of Facebook’s four tracking methods. The preferences manager, for instance,
lets users tell Facebook they don’t have certain interests that the site has
associated with them or their behavior, but there’s no way to tell Facebook
that you don’t want it to track your interests, at all.
Likewise, Facebook allows users to opt-out of
advertisements based on their use of outside websites and apps. But that
doesn’t mean that Facebook never tracks those people when they’re on other
sites, Eckersley said: It just limits some of its more all-seeing methods. And
while Facebook did push its data-broker partners to adopt better privacy
measures when it began working with them in 2013, each broker still requires
you to file an opt-out request with them individually.
83. Users who spend money on household products
84. Users who spend money on products for kids or pets,
and what kinds of pets
85. Users whose household makes more purchases than is
average
86. Users who tend to shop online (or off)
87. Types of restaurants user eats at
88. Kinds of stores user shops at
89. Users who are “receptive” to offers from companies
offering online auto insurance, higher education or mortgages, and prepaid
debit cards/satellite TV
90. Length of time user has lived in house
91. Users who are likely to move soon
92. Users who are interested in the Olympics, fall
football, cricket or Ramadan
93. Users who travel frequently, for work or pleasure
94. Users who commute to work
95. Types of vacations user tends to go on
96. Users who recently returned from a trip
97. Users who recently used a travel app
98. Users who participate in a timeshare
There is another option, of course: If Facebook tracking
freaks you out, simply don’t use it. There are people who want targeted,
“relevant” ads — and there are others, like Eckersley, who can’t stomach it.
But wait, what was that? Eckersley has Facebook? Surely
hell just froze over.
“It’s the paradox of modern life,” he laughed, adding
that he needs the site to keep in touch with friends and family. “We’re
strongly incentivized, by the culture around us, to use this technology. It’s
incredibly useful — and an incredibly giant structural problem for our
privacy.”
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