Don't assume everything is pure science and not just mere coincidence. Facebook sometimes gives me military related ads that specifically call out military people -- let's assume the marketer knows enough to put some sort of targeting on their ads, then why would I be getting those ads? There are too many variables at play to know. Also, I've seen some bugs where people get ads specific to one location even though their IP address and their stated location on their profile is something completely different. We could chalk this up to coincidence or maybe there was enough data on his profile to assume Matt is gay. At the same time, I don't think it's creepy because the advertisers don't see the names/identities of the people they target on Facebook, so the ads are still private until the user actually signs up for a product or service.
100% accuracy is never going to be possible. In fact I wouldn't be surprised to see a price structure for targeted advertisements based on confidence intervals.
Of course. So when someone posts an article with anecdotal evidence towards the way Facebook uses data, we can assume it might be true in thousands of other cases or tens of millions of cases. It's hard to know which though.
A different pricing structure would be interesting to see sometime in the future.
I made a point earlier that the advertiser chooses the target audience and I don't believe FB does what this article claims. I've seen retargeting creep into FB lately but again someone is making assertions rather than an algorithm IMO. Some 3rd party ad networks let you really drill down.
I think FB can do what this article claims but is not actually doing it.
I can't say what FB did here with much confidence - its an anecodte. But I'd like to point out that it isn't hard to reverse engineer the information out of FB. Buy a targeted ad and then watch the click-throughs. Cross reference the click-throughs from that ad with data from another tracker that knows identities and you've now been able to link whatever your FB ad criteria was to the identities of anyone who clicks through - even if they don't do anything else besides click through.
