Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Has Considered Profiling Its Users' Personalities and Using the Information To Target Ads (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: A patent filed by the social network describes how personality characteristics, including emotional stability, could be determined from people's messages and status updates. The firm is currently embroiled in a privacy scandal over the use of its data by a political consultancy. Facebook says it has never used the personality test in its products. The patent, first filed in 2012, is in the names of Michael Nowak and Dean Eckles. Mr Nowak has worked for Facebook for 10 years, while Prof Eckles now teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The patent has been updated twice, most recently in 2016. The BBC has seen emails from Mr Eckles and other Facebook staff to University of Cambridge psychologists in which they discuss analysis of data to infer personality traits, and talk of using such research to improve the product for users and advertisers.
Maybe on CNN with their readers. But on Slashdot I think going assumption is outfits like Facebook try manipulating every piece of info on a user to target stupid ads.
Tomorrow we'll learn Facebook tried not-so-PC datapoints to target mortgage ads. Stuff like sexy preferences or what race the user might be etc. Everyone will be in shock I guess - except me because I assume they're doing that already. I would guess most Slashers are in same boat.
Don't the big players already do this to a degree? I search for "underwear" online and then for the next 6 months see a thousand underwear ads on different sites. It's creepy and annoying. Profiling a personality is just a generalization of the technique.
Table-ized A.I.
Given your personality profile, here are some ads from the NRA.
Facebook Has Considered Profiling Its Users' Personalities and Using the Information To Sell to Employers, Government, Insurance companies, Landlords, Lawyers, Universities etc...
You seem depressed... depressed people seem to be more likely to buy, rope + ladder combinations. Razor blades, and sleeping pills. You seem angry... check out Joes gunshop You seem insecure. Check out this new SUV
Film at 11!
Check your premises.
The intense turning of the blind eye that advertising execs do is astonishing. I have never met a human who has click on an add on purpose, not even one person I have asked has ever done it except on accident which they quickly click out of. Yet billions of dollars are literally wasted on fake advertising, it is fake because any metric used to promote it is a lie. Facebook is one huge lie, the people there lie about what they are doing, it is amazing that almost all people on Facebook are so happy, their lives are perfect, their food choices are divine...on and on....fake. Then the company sells advertising to fools using flat out lies they call metrics. You would think at least one of these advertisers would question some of their friends, or just randomly ask people in Starbucks....no one clicks on adds except on accident.
I do a search for something, lets say a car part. I find it, I buy it. Done. Now, I get ads for the next three months from people trying to sell me this same part. You're wasting your time and money, folks.
But by the time I might need another part for my shitbox, the advertisers have forgotten what model I drive.
Have gnu, will travel.
they're not doing this already and just not calling it that then, well, I've got some lovely beachfront property in Nebraska I'd like to sell you.
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The problem isn't ad-targeting per se, it's the things people with less-benign intentions can do with the same data. If I could go through life without ever seeing another ad for diapers, dog products, or tampons & see only ads for cool computer hardware, cat toys, and other things I'm interested in, that's fine. If someone uses the same data to assign me a "potential employee score" for HR departments that hurts my career, that's a HUGE problem.
The gray area is for advertisers to offer good deals to some people, and withhold them from others ("poverty is EXPENSIVE"), because that violates most Americans' sense of fairness (as a society, we DESPISE haggling & view it as borderline-immoral even though we grudgingly tolerate it for things like cars).
Website found to be doing the thing it was designed to do the whole time!
next you are going to tell me that google uses my search history to target ads - the very ads they run next to my results!!
A number of large universities, worldwide, have ploughed $millions into research on learning analytics in the past decade. The most cited paper, from Purdue University that reported a minor success in reducing the number of "at risk" student dropouts (Purdue Horizons project), turned out to be a simple statistical error. Nobody yet knows how to effectively predict what people are going to do based on their internet usage data, even when they spend an awful lot of time online studying, working, and socialising.
Claims of being able to manipulate individual people or specific groups of people online are pure marketing hype. Online advertising works the same as everywhere else: Emotive messages that appeal to our many basic cognitive biases. Since AI and algorithms have literally zero understanding of human psychology and therefore no theoretical or principled basis upon which to analyse data, they literally can't tell if a pattern or probability is significant, i.e. tells us something interesting and useful, or not.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
Long before 2012, Raytheon was building intelligence software to mine the social media sites. As mentioned in this article they built a large-scale system for the government in 2010. A review of their research contracts in the years leading up to that shows that personality classification and psychological disorder diagnosis using social media are both big business for them. This patent likely steps all over the black projects at Raytheon which came much sooner in the timeline.
If you go to your ad settings, it shows how FB thinks you align politically. It has me listed as "very liberal" at the moment.