Paul Francis is quoted because he's studied this exact phenomena. The relevant paper is here:
Challenges in Measuring Online Advertising Systems
Internet Measurement Conference 2011
Saikat Guha (Microsoft Research)
Bin Cheng (MPI-SWS)
Paul Francis (MPI-SWS)
http://conferences.sigcomm.org/imc/2010/papers/p81.pdf
Part of the paper focuses on how Facebook ads are targeted. Experiment 8, page 5, looks at the impact of sexual preference on ads. The result is that gay men on Facebook are targeted with ads that 1) target them exclusively, and 2) don't mention that they are gay related. The example given is an ad for nursing school.
The problem is even if a person isn't publicly revealing their sexual preference, an advertiser can infer user's preference based on clicks. The user has no idea that they are implicitly disclosing the information, because they have no idea they are being targeted by a very narrow segment of ads.
I would agree though, if you're really, really worried about your sexual preference leaking, then Facebook isn't a wise organization to entrust the information to...
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Paul Francis is quoted because he's studied this exact phenomena. The relevant paper is here: Challenges in Measuring Online Advertising Systems Internet Measurement Conference 2011 Saikat Guha (Microsoft Research) Bin Cheng (MPI-SWS) Paul Francis (MPI-SWS) http://conferences.sigcomm.org/imc/2010/papers/p81.pdf Part of the paper focuses on how Facebook ads are targeted. Experiment 8, page 5, looks at the impact of sexual preference on ads. The result is that gay men on Facebook are targeted with ads that 1) target them exclusively, and 2) don't mention that they are gay related. The example given is an ad for nursing school. The problem is even if a person isn't publicly revealing their sexual preference, an advertiser can infer user's preference based on clicks. The user has no idea that they are implicitly disclosing the information, because they have no idea they are being targeted by a very narrow segment of ads. I would agree though, if you're really, really worried about your sexual preference leaking, then Facebook isn't a wise organization to entrust the information to...