Besides
a few outliers, the ads that Facebook targeted towards me really did not
surprise me greatly. The group of tags that they thought I was interested in
consisted mostly of music, movies, and other art related topics. I frequently
use Facebook to keep up with these musical artists and movies so it makes a lot
of sense that they would target this type of content towards me. I also saw a
lot of sports related topics, which I also keep up with on Facebook. I was also
targeted for location specific ads such as ads for businesses in Milwaukee,
where I’m from, and obviously Madison. Nothing really surprised me about most
of the tags except for a few stragglers such as the “Los Angeles International
Airport” and “Werner Heisenberg”. But for the most part each of the tags
reflected my interest pretty accurately.
It was a slightly unsettling to see
the massive amount of information that they have cultivated about my life such
as all of my social contents and publicized events that I am involved in. I was
surprised that they literally had a printout of all of my text conversations
via Facebook dating back all the way to 2010. It’s a little creepy but it was
also kind of cool to go back and see who I was talking to in high school and
what I was talking to them about. It also contained a huge list of all of my
active sessions as well as everything that was posted on my wall by me or any
of my friends dating back a few years. The amount of primarily useless
information that they can amass on Facebook is creepy but, in my case, pretty
harmless and I can’t see any of it coming back to haunt me in the future.
As for what Google thought I was
interested in, most was also fairly unsurprising. The only categories that
really surprised me were make-up and cosmetics, East Asian Music, and Toyota.
They seemed to think that I was mostly interested in business news,
entertainment, music, films, and humor. This pretty accurately reflects what I
use to search on google. It didn’t have any history of what ads I have clicked
through to in google because I use a program called adblock in my browser which
prevents ads from showing up on my window. Overall I thought the information
that Google had about me was relevant to my interests and internet activity,
but I did not think it was a very complete picture of who I am. I read a lot of
news about international affairs and politics and it had nothing about that. I
often go on random search streams about historical figures and events which the
servers don’t seem to pick up on. At the same time historical interests might
have relatively little salience in prescribing ad targeting. The account of my
interests was significantly less comprehensive than the list that Facebook had
managed to collect. However, it is still conflicting to know that a website
knows more about you than some of your friends may know, and definitely
something to consider when using the internet.
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