Do you know what Facebook knows?
74 per cent of Americans unaware of social-media giant’s ad preferences list A core part of Facebook’s business is building a portrait of users for advertisers.
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 when the Pew Research Center set out to examine that question, it found that 74 per cent of Americans didn’t even know that the list existed, until the survey instructed them on how to view it.
Nearly 9 in 10 (88 per cent) 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. Overall, 59 per cent said that those interests were accurate, that they reflected who they were in real life. (By contrast, 27 per cent said the interests were not very or at all accurate.)
Once they had a chance to view this list, a slim majority — 51per cent — were not comfortable with Facebook collecting this information about them, according to the report, which was released Wednesday.
“We consistently find that there’s a paradox at the centre of generalized privacy research,” said Lee Rainie, director of internet and technology research at Pew. “Americans, being Americans, say that it matters, but they behave in a way that doesn’t indicate that it matters.”
The survey was conducted in 2018, several months after Facebook suspended Cambridge Analytica for improperly collecting data from Facebook users, a revelation that caused a major crisis of trust for the platform. The news was the catalyst for congressional hearings and an attempt to encourage users to quit Facebook.
The Pew data suggest that, even as Facebook becomes an increasing subject of concern for Americans, “no matter how much effort people make in disclosing what’s available and make it clear that users can make choices, everybody isn’t picking up on that,” Rainie said.
In a statement, Facebook said it believed “Pew’s findings underscore the importance of transparency and control across the entire ad industry, and the need for more consum- er education around the controls we place at people’s fingertips.”
The survey found a relationship between the accuracy of the information Facebook collects and how Americans feel about it. More than three-quarters, 78 per cent, of those who thought that Facebook’s listings for them were either not at all or not very accurate said they were uncomfortable with the list. But 48 per cent of those who thought the list was accurate felt the same way.
“There are a lot of people who say, ‘I don’t want to be misunderstood,’ ” Rainie said. The data support a longtime observation that everyone has their own line when it comes to privacy concerns. Other findings from the study:
About half (51 per cent) of Americans are assigned a political label by Facebook. In the survey results, those labels were pretty evenly distributed among those deemed to be conservative, liberal and moderate. For those with a label, 73 per cent said it was either very or somewhat accurate. Just over a quarter, 27 per cent, said it wasn’t accurate.
About 2 in 10, 21 per cent, were assigned a “multicultural affinity” group. Facebook’s algorithm guessed that 43 per cent of those had an interest in African-American culture, 43 per cent were labelled as having an interest in Hispanic culture, and 10 per cent were assigned as interested in Asian- American culture. Of those assigned one of these affinity groups, 60 per cent said they had at least a “very” or “somewhat” strong affinity to that group (57 per cent of those assigned a group said they identified themselves as a member of it).
By contrast, 37 per cent of those assigned a group said they did not have a strong affinity with it, and 39 per cent said they did not see themselves as a member of that group.
The Pew Research Center poll was conducted Sept. 4 to Oct. 1 among a nationally representative sample of 964 U.S. adults who have a Facebook account. The margin of error for the full sample is plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.