Jack Sweeney, who gained notoriety for his @ElonJet account on X and maintained many of the suspended accounts, said on Threads that the development is “reminiscent of all my accounts getting suspended on Twitter.” The shuttered accounts, which used publicly available data to show the flight paths of private jets, initially displayed a message on Monday that read, “The link you followed may be broken, or the page may have been removed.”
Meta provided no direct warning or explanation for the suspensions, according to Sweeney, who says the accounts appear “blacked out with no options to interact or receive information.” In a statement to TechCrunch, however, an unnamed Meta spokesperson said “Given the risk of physical harm to individuals, and in keeping with the independent Oversight Board’s recommendation, we’ve disabled these accounts for violating our privacy policy.”
Huh? How do you think ad targeting works?
“Show my ad to hornly lonely 13 y/o that suffer from Tourette”
vs
“Here is a list of 13 y/o that suffer from Tourette”
One of these options is less profitable for an ad network in the long run.
Did you all forget about Cambridge Analytica?
It’s funny how people who get their news exclusively from their Facebook feeds have never heard of Cambridge Analytica. I can’t imagine how that could happen.
It has been over 6 years. I guess a lot of users has been too young to care.
An advertiser contacts Facebook and says, ‘We’d like to advertise this product to a specific group of people,’ and Facebook says, ‘Sure, hand us your money and the ad you’d like us to display,’ and then targets that ad to the desired audience. At no point does Facebook hand over user data to the advertiser.
For example, if I want to advertise my home renovation services to all the elderly home owners in my city, then what use would it be for me if they just handed me a list of those people? None. They’re the advertising platform. It’s them who targets those ads.
Except you can add a tracking pixel to the destination website after people click through on the ad, which correlates to people’s individual profile. To say that isn’t “handing out personal information to others” is sophistry of the highest order.
They’re not handing out personal information. If you hide stuff like that in your ad links then you’re the malicious actor, not facebook.
You may want to familiarize yourself with how their tracking pixel works. In brief, you add a line of code (provided by Facebook) to any given website and on page load that code displays a 1x1px transparent image from Facebook’s servers that allows them to establish a correlation between the loading of that website and the identity of the person logged in to Facebook on that browser. it isn’t “hiding” anything or circumventing Facebook in any way. It’s a core part of their advertising offerings. https://www.facebook.com/business/goals/retargeting