Facebook Ads Could 'Out' Gay Users

itwbennett writes "Researchers at Microsoft Research India and the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany have written a paper showing that a users may be inadvertently revealing their sexual preference to advertisers. 'One example was an advertisement for a nursing program at a medical college in Florida, which was only shown to gay men. The researchers said that persons seeing the ad would not know that it had been exclusively aimed at them solely based on their sexuality, nor would they realize that clicking on the ad would reveal to the advertiser, by implication, their sexual preference in addition to other information they might expect to be sent, such as their IP (Internet Protocol) address.' For its part, Facebook 'downplayed the study, saying that the site does not pass any personally identifiable information back to an advertiser.'"

Comments

Re:Which part of this is "inadvertent"?

[causality]

I was using paranoid in the layman, common usage sense. I'm certainly not saying that someone worried about their Facebook settings has a clinical mental disorder. In fact, I was only using the word because LBArrettAnderson used it in his post responding to my original post. If you'd rather use the phrase "security-conscious", that's fine by me.

It really takes a big man to admit that there may be a better way, or even an alternate way for that matter.

The thing is that "paranoid" really does have a definite meaning. That meaning has become blurred due to over-usage. This is like a hypnotic state of suggestibility. Common usage makes something accetpable, while acceptability makes something take on a fuller and fuller connotation. It so happens that all of this works in favor of the anti-privacy side of things. The very best thing about human beings is that they can get used to almost anything. That's adaptation. The very worst thing about human beings is that they can get used to almost anything. That's complacency. When intrusion becomes the norm, this is what you find.