Users unaware Facebook creates list about them

Facebook keeps a running list of things it has learned about you for advertisers. At this point, the list isn’t incredibly hard to find: go to your account settings, click on “ads” and the list will appear, ready for you to peruse or modify as you see fit.

These lists have been public for a while. In pre-election 2016, The Washington Post compiled a list of 98 categories that Facebook might use to build a portrait of you for advertisers. Based on what you tell Facebook, the company might be able to zero in on your interest in dogs, for instance. Maybe it guesses that you’ve been recently shopping for a home or a mattress or a car. For some people, Facebook takes a guess at their political beliefs and “racial affinity.” Those data points are then used to allow advertisers to target ads to the people who might be most likely to click on them. It’s a core part of Facebook’s business.

But it has been trickier to know exactly how the public feels about this information. When the Pew Research Center set out to examine that question, it found that 74 percent of Americans didn’t even know that the list existed, until the survey instructed them on how to view it.

Nearly 9 in 10 Americans found that Facebook had generated some material for them on the ad preferences page, and 6 in 10 had 10 or more interests listed for them.