Do you think privacy of users in ensured when Facebook is us

Do you think privacy of users in ensured when Facebook is using private data to design customized ads?

Solution

As more and more pepople log in to the online world, more types of data about people is collected and stored by the online services, which leads to increased concerns related to its privacy and re-purposing. One of the big concerns users have when they share personal information on social networking sites is the possibility that their personal information may be sold to advertisers.

Although leading social networks such as Facebook have refrained from selling the information to advertisers, they have created systems that enable advertisers to run highly targeted social advertising campaigns. Not surprisingly, the goals of enabling highly targeted advertising and protecting the privacy of users’ personal information entrusted to the company are at odds. To reconcile these conflicting goals, Facebook has designed an advertising system which provides a separation layer between individual user data and advertisers. Concretely, Facebook collects from advertisers the ad creatives to display and the targeting criteria which the users being shown the ad should satisfy, and delivers the ads to people who fit those criteria.

Many people understand that in order to receive more personalization they need to give up some of their data. However, they rely on the promises such as those of that personalization is done by the entity they’ve entrusted their data with, and that only aggregate anonymized information is shared with external entities. However, it is been observed through experiments that, this is not the case, and information that has been explicitly marked by users as private or information that they have not posted on the site but is inferable from the content of the ads they click, leaks in a way tied to their identity through the current design of the most powerful microtargeted advertising system. If people were aware of the true privacy cost of ad microtargeting, their views towards it would possibly be much more negative.

Although using only fully public information in the advertising system would come closest to delivering on the privacy promises made by Facebook to its users , it would also introduce a business challenge for Facebook. As much of the information users share is “Friends Only”, using only information shared with “Everyone” would likely degrade the quality of the audience microtargeting that Facebook is able to offer advertisers, and hence create a business incentive to encourage users to share their information more widely in order to monetize better (something that Facebook has been accused of but vehemently denies ).

Another approach would be to introduce an additional set of privacy controls to indicate which information the users are comfortable sharing with advertisers; however, this would create significant additional cognitive burden on users navigating an already very complex set of privacy controls.

A conceptual approach for achieving privacy would be akin to performing a broad match—showing the ad not only to users who match the campaign targeting criteria perfectly, but also to users who match them less well (e.g., in proportion to some quality of the match score using the exponential mechanism of). The approach of modifying each campaign into a broad match campaign would significantly undermine the utility potential of microtargeted advertising to reach a highly targeted audience for whom the ad is most relevant. It would require advertiser buy-in, an ability to design a meaningful match score for a variety of user profile features and ad campaigns, as well as a payment scheme that charges advertisers differently and fairly depending on the quality of the match without jeopardizing privacy.

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