"Facebook enables advertisers to promote content to nearly 900,000 people interested in "vaccine controversies", the Guardian has found.
Other groups of people that advertisers can pay to reach on Facebook include those interested in "Dr Tenpenny on Vaccines", which refers to anti-vaccine activist Sherri Tenpenny, and "informed consent", which is language that anti-vaccine propagandists have adopted to fight vaccination laws."
"We now know targeted Facebook advertising played a big role in 2015's general election.
The Conservatives spent £1.2m on Facebook advertising in 2015 - and it paid off with a majority, albeit a small one. It is understood both them and Labour plan on spending similar amounts on Facebook advertising. "
"If Facebook cared about unfair profiling and privacy abuse, for instance, it would probably not have started grouping its users together based on their "Ethnic Affinity". It wouldn't then allow that ethnic affinity to be used as a basis for excluding users from advertisements, and it certainly wouldn't allows that ethnic affinity to be used as a basis for potentially illegal discrimination in real estate advertising."
"Sony Ericsson has landed in hot water over the way it advertised its Satio smartphone.
The company "exaggerated" the handset's ability to access Facebook, according to the Advertising Standards Authority(ASA)."
Gotta be careful with what ya promise =P
"With news that the 15 million Twitter users in the UK can now be targeted at individual postcode levels, the micro-blogging platform is selling its advertising opportunities as ultra-geographically precise, and therefore ultra-cost effective.
"The key benefit of geo-targeting is that it enables advertisers, or in this case political parties, the ability to reach users in specific regions, metropolitan areas and now postcodes," Twitter said in a blog post. "
"They found that despite the 40% "ad-tech" premium charged by behavioral ad companies, the ads only added about 4% the media companies that published them, meaning that behavioral advertising is a losing proposition. "
"The 61-year-old British computer scientist described how political advertising has become a sophisticated and targeted industry, drawing on enormous pools of personal data on Facebook and Google. This means that campaigns create precisely targeted ads for individuals - as many as 50,000 variations each day on Facebook during the 2016 US election, he said."
"It's actually a big myth that search engines need to track your personal search history to make money or deliver quality search results. Almost all of the money search engines make (including Google) is based on the keywords you type in, without knowing anything about you, including your search history or the seemingly endless amounts of additional data points they have collected about registered and non-registered users alike. In fact, search advertisers buy search ads by bidding on keywords, not people….This keyword-based advertising is our primary business model. "
"On the other hand, users (as distinct from developers) are about to see an upside of Apple's monopoly power. The next update of its mobile operating system, iOS14, includes a change that should have a dire impact on many online advertisers. The industry assigns a unique code to each device called an IDFA. Knowing your IDFA can help advertisers tell whether their ads are effective, particularly when they've shown you the same ad in multiple places. Facebook uses the IDFA as part of Audience Network, its ad network for developers."
"In one case, a government campaign aimed at helping young people off benefits was targeted at Facebook users with interests including "afro-textured hair" and the "West Indies cricket team".
Other campaigns have targeted LGBTQ+ content at people interested in "genderqueer" issues and the TV show RuPaul's Drag Race; council support services at people interested in "hijabs" and "Islamic dietary requirements"; and an appeal for witnesses to a murder in Manchester aimed at people interested in "hip-hop", "rapping", Kim Kardashian and Usain Bolt.
The "microtargeting" is revealed in analysis of more than 12,000 ads which ran on Facebook and Instagram between late 2020 and 2023. Supplied to UK academics by Facebook's parent company Meta, and shared with the Observer, the data gives an insight into the use of targeted advertising by the state based on profiling by the world's biggest social media company.
In 2021, Facebook announced a ban on targeting based on race, religion and sexual orientation amid concerns about discrimination, which led to the removal of several interest categories that had been used by advertisers to reach and exclude minority groups."
"The brochure also advertised "Optional Demographic Profiling Facial analysis algorithms", including "gender, race/ethnicity, age" profiling. A second, Italian-based, company was also cited on Hikvision's website as offering racial profiling.
The company removed both claims from its website following an inquiry from the Guardian, and said the technology had never been sold in the UK. The document, it said, detailed the "potential application of our cameras, with technology built independently by FaiceTech and other partners"."
"A hacker is advertising what he says is more than one hundred million LinkedIn logins for sale.
The IDs were reportedly sourced from a breach four years ago, which had previously been thought to have included a fraction of that number.
At the time, the business-focused social network said it had reset the accounts of those it thought had been compromised."
"While Google has played down the notion of rolling out anything soon (it will take years until Glass builds up enough users to make it worthwhile), marketers can't stop buzzing about the possibility of paying for ads in the physical world based on user engagement and reactions. The patent even details how a device like Google Glass could infer a user's emotional response to an ad - whether they were happy, sad or indifferent - and adjust pricing accordingly."
"The universities admissions service, Ucas, broke data protection rules when it signed up teenagers to receive adverts about mobile phones, energy drinks and other products, the information commissioner has ruled."
In the United States, a vicious battle has begun between the leading companies in the 3G market. Their vicious advertising campaigns have no sign of stopping. So what will this do to sales?
Do you think this would be a good article? You suggest that reliability and authenticity are the main issues according to your tagging - make sure you explain this in your annotation...
"Mobile advertising was the great hope for newspapers and magazines, replacing revenues lost in the switch to digital from print. Earlier this year the influential analyst Mary Meeker, of the venture capitalists Kleiner Perkins, had pegged it as a $25bn opportunity in the US alone. Now the hoped-for revenues are in peril, and publishers - and people who care about free, independent news - are rightly worried."
"Westfield's Smartscreen network was developed by the French software firm Quividi back in 2015. Their discreet cameras capture blurry images of shoppers and apply statistical analysis to identify audience demographics. And once the billboards have your attention they hit record, sharing your reaction with advertisers. Quividi says their billboards can distinguish shoppers' gender with 90% precision, five categories of mood from "very happy to very unhappy" and customers' age within a five-year bracket."
"The single biggest known British political advertiser on Facebook is a mysterious pro-Brexit campaign group pushing for a no-deal exit from the EU. The revelation about Britain's Future, which has never disclosed the source of its funding or organisational structure, has raised concerns about the influence of "dark money" in British politics."
"The ethics of Facebook's micro-targeted advertising was thrust into the spotlight this week by a report out of Australia. The article, based on a leaked presentation, said that Facebook was able to identify teenagers at their most vulnerable, including when they feel "insecure", "worthless", "defeated" and "stressed"."
"Most people are aware of the cookies that track them across the web, and the privacy-invading practices of Google search, but did you know Google's email service, Gmail, collects large amounts of data too?
This was recently put into stark focus for iPhone users when Gmail published its app "privacy label" - a self-declared breakdown of the data it collects and shares with advertisers as part of a new stipulation on the Apple App Store."