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when a user gives Facebook a phone number for two-factor authentication or in order to receive alerts about new log-ins to a user’s account, that phone number became targetable by an advertiser within a couple of weeks

I’ve been trying to get Facebook to disclose shadow contact information to users for almost a year now. But it has even refused to disclose these shadow details to users in Europe, where privacy law is stronger and explicitly requires companies to tell users what data it has on them.

To test the shadow information finding, the researchers tried a real-world test. They uploaded a list of hundreds of landline numbers from Northeastern University. These are numbers that people who work for Northeastern are unlikely to have added to their accounts, though it’s very likely that the numbers would be in the address books of people who know them and who might have uploaded them to Facebook in order to “find friends.” The researchers found that many of these numbers could be targeted with ads, and when they ran an ad campaign, the ad turned up in the Facebook news feed of Mislove, whose landline had been included in the file; I confirmed this with my own test targeting his landline number.

“I think that many users don’t fully understand how ad targeting works today: that advertisers can literally specify exactly which users should see their ads by uploading the users’ email addresses, phone numbers, names+dates of birth, etc,” said Mislove. “In describing this work to colleagues, many computer scientists were surprised by this, and were even more surprised to learn that not only Facebook, but also Google, Pinterest, and Twitter all offer related services. Thus, we think there is a significant need to educate users about how exactly targeted advertising on such platforms works today.”

There are certainly creepier practices happening in the advertising industry, but it’s troubling this is happening at Facebook because of its representations about letting you control your ad experience. It’s disturbing that Facebook is reducing the privacy of people who want their accounts to be more secure by using the information they provide for that purpose to data-mine them for ads.

When I asked the company last year about whether it used shadow contact information for ads, it gave me inaccurate information, and it hadn’t made the practice clear in its extensive messaging to users about ads

Actions A suite of action buttons are now featured prominently near the top of Pages. These buttons enable people to take actions like book an appointment for a haircut, order a pizza, send a message or write a Recommendation.

More visibility for stories Since launching stories in 2017, Facebook has been experimenting with ways to make it easier for people to engage with your story and with this update, people can view your business story by tapping on the Page profile photo.

Events ticket sales 700 million people use Facebook Events each month and now businesses will be able to sell tickets directly through Facebook Pages. Facebook is also creating event-specific ads to help with promotion and marketing.

38 of 72 Instant Articles launch partner publications including the New York Times and Washington Post have ditched the Facebook controlled format according to a study by Columbia Journalism Review.

The problem is that for society as a whole, this leads to a demonetization and eventual defunding of some news publishers, content creators and utility providers while simultaneously making them heavily reliant on Facebook. This gives Facebook the power to decide what types of content, what topics, and what sources are important. Even if Facebook believes itself to be a neutral tech platform, it implicitly plays the role of media company as its values define the feed. Having a single editor’s fallible algorithms determine the news consumption of the wired world is a precarious situation.

the real problem only manifests when Facebook shifts directions. Its comes to the conclusion that users want to see more video, so the format gets more visibility in the News Feed. Soon, publishers scramble to pivot to video, hiring teams and buying expensive equipment so they can blast the content on Facebook rather than thinking about their loyal site visitors. But then Facebook decides too much passive video is bad for you or isn’t interesting, so its News Feed visibility is curtailed, and publishers have wasted their resources and time chasing a white rabbit… or, in this case, a blue one.

With brands investing over $6 billion with Facebook, it seems unlikely to me that this algorithm change was designed to intentionally punish content produced by brands. It would be unwise to do that, because the appeal of Facebook to brands is the mix of organic and paid exposure.

might want to think twice, or even thrice, before making the leap. The new tool is intended to help brands, local business, organizations or public figures create a new Fa

Facebook told me that this is a tool meant for businesses, not individuals. The company doesn’t encourage users to convert their profiles to Pages because content doesn’t move over, only connections.

Here is what converting a page actually means, in terms of user content:Only your profile photo transfers, no other profile photos or intricate profile information carries over.Any uploaded photos, wall posts, comments and likes disappear.Facebook messages disappear.Any applications linked to a Facebook account lose that connection.The username you have on your profile may or may not transfer over. In my case, it didn’t, and now http://www.facebook.com/christina.warren serves up a big fat, not found page, rather than my profile. The kicker? The name has been “used” so I can’t claim it again.The resulting account is known as a Business Account and can only be used to create and manage pages, not to engage in personal contact. This means that even if you do create a brand new Facebook profile (more on that later), you have to consistently switch between the two accounts for different tasks.

Facebook has indicated that brands should pay to promote their content, but our research shows that organic content leads to better buying actions.

While some posts will get more reach after two days, much of the reach is captured in this methodology, as the half-life of a Facebook post has historically been only 30 minutes.

For now, it will capture websites that use Facebook's conversion tracking pixel -- which advertisers affix to see if their Facebook ads are yielding sales and traffic -- as well as mobile apps that use Facebook's software development kit to deploy Facebook services, like the log-in. Websites and apps that have Facebook's tracking software encoded to retarget their visitors are also in the mix. Impressions tracked via the "like" button encoded in mobile apps -- which Facebook recently introduced at its f8 conference for developers -- will also be included.

3. Sensationalized language And the last Facebook ad approach in the firing line is 'ads which use exaggerated headlines or command a reaction from people but don't deliver on the landing page'.

Can you front-load engagement to convince the news feed algorithm to show the post to a larger audience? It’s hard to say how much impact doing this would have, but here’s how you do it:

The new post-targeting feature, still being rolled out to all Facebook pages, allows you to segment your fans by criteria previously only available to advertisers. This includes age, gender, interested in (likes), relationship status, all education information, workplace, plus the old options like language, country, state, and city.

Overall, there are much more industries going down than up.

For example, the “TV Channel” category which saw its Organic reach climb from 15 to 20% between July 2013 and May 2014 has 17 pages in the sample and their average fan count is 372k.  So, it’s easy to tell page size is not creating any bias here!