Signal provided details of its impressive guerilla marketing campaign on Facebook and Instagram on its company blog, Instagram Ads Facebook Won’t Show You. The company tries to place multivariable targeted ads on Facebook and Instagram based on multiple variables, including location, age, sociodemographic variables, interests and behaviors, and inserts the values of the variables on which the ads were generated. The troubling thing for the users who receive these ads is that, no matter who is on the other end, Facebook does know a lot — probably too much — about them in this case. Imagine encountering such ads on your screen, whose data effectively matches your own, and it’s certainly unpleasant, and likely to make you rethink a lot of things about your use of social networks and the web in general.
The company tried to place ads on Facebook and Instagram, only to find that Facebook almost immediately blocked its accounts from doing so. Facebook denied any of this in a tweet, but Signal has screenshots and proof. You know. Facebook wants you to receive ads, but it doesn’t want you to know why you’re receiving them, or what variables the companies that contract with them use to serve them to you.
Clearly, Facebook is not happy that its users can reliably check the amount of information the company has about them, and how they resell that information to advertisers, and segment it according to its criteria. The experience of seeing one of these ads targeted at us must feel like being in front of a screen, targeted by a sniper’s telescope, who can select us not on the basis of the usual variables, but on the basis of whatever we say in conversation, the news we read or any website we visit. For Facebook, we are transparent and everything we do or say can be used by anyone who pays for advertising.
Signal’s idea is to get users to switch from WhatsApp to Signal, a messaging service run by a nonprofit foundation that has proven its commitment to protecting users’ privacy and has seen high usage rates, especially after the latest changes to WhatsApp’s privacy policy. But Signal’s campaign has illustrated how Facebook uses all the data it can generate on every user, including many variables that should never be ethically split, and how it resells them to any company willing to pay for the information. It’s peering into a screen and seeing your image — and your deepest fears about your privacy, or lack thereof, reflected on the screen.
This is a routine exposure of unlimited spying on users. If you want to keep your data — where you are, what you like, what you eat, what you comment on in conversations, your political leanings — available to anyone who wants to pay. The solution is to uninstall Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp and advise all your friends to do the same. If you still think your privacy and personal data is the price you have to pay for free use of certain products, think again. There are alternatives, and they’re not simply alternatives to communicating with your friends via instant messaging: they’re alternatives that respect the way we understand the Internet and advertising.
Source www.forbes.com/sites/enriq…