How Facebook Advertises to Your Hobbies and Interests
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/technology/how-facebook-ads-work.html
Everyone who uses Facebook has wondered at one point in their life how the company shows them ads so eerily similar to their interests. Are they getting these ads by coincidence? Or do they somehow know your hobbies, interests and behavior? It turns out that whenever you use and interact with anything on Facebook, you leave a trail of “digital bread crumbs” that the company can then collect and analyze. Using this data, Facebook can then target your interests, characteristics, and even your behavior, such as physical in store visits and activity on other websites to show you ads that they think will relate to you. Furthermore, Facebook also implements something called “look-alike matching” where if someone provides their email to an ad, Facebook will then show these ads to people who they believe have similar interests to the person with the provided email.
As we learned in class, search engines, such as Google, implement auctions in order to determine which advertiser gets what ad slot. Facebook similarly auctions off their ad slots but also weighs each bid according to the relevance to each situation, meaning that the more relevant the ad is, the less the advertiser will have to pay. Furthermore, instead of comparing the relevancy of a certain ad with other ads, they compare the relevancy of an ad to all of the content on their platform allowing advertisements to blend in with organic content. Normally these ads are marked with a sponsored tag but if a user were to like the ad, then content from the advertiser would show up in their feed without the sponsored tag acting as free advertisements. As these ads are shared more and more, Facebook’s algorithm will see them as more relevant causing them to cheaper to post making it possible that in the future, ads will become so frequent that we may not be able to tell the difference between organic content and advertisements.