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Facebook Has Considered Profiling Its Users' Personalities and Using the Information To Target Ads (bbc.com) 59

Posted by msmash from the of-course-it-has dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: A patent filed by the social network describes how personality characteristics, including emotional stability, could be determined from people's messages and status updates. The firm is currently embroiled in a privacy scandal over the use of its data by a political consultancy. Facebook says it has never used the personality test in its products. The patent, first filed in 2012, is in the names of Michael Nowak and Dean Eckles. Mr Nowak has worked for Facebook for 10 years, while Prof Eckles now teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The patent has been updated twice, most recently in 2016. The BBC has seen emails from Mr Eckles and other Facebook staff to University of Cambridge psychologists in which they discuss analysis of data to infer personality traits, and talk of using such research to improve the product for users and advertisers.
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Facebook Has Considered Profiling Its Users' Personalities and Using the Information To Target Ads More

Facebook Has Considered Profiling Its Users' Personalities and Using the Information To Target Ads

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  • This is news? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TheZeitgeist ( 5083373 ) on Tuesday April 24, 2018 @11:33AM (#56494859)

    Maybe on CNN with their readers. But on Slashdot I think going assumption is outfits like Facebook try manipulating every piece of info on a user to target stupid ads.

    Tomorrow we'll learn Facebook tried not-so-PC datapoints to target mortgage ads. Stuff like sexy preferences or what race the user might be etc. Everyone will be in shock I guess - except me because I assume they're doing that already. I would guess most Slashers are in same boat.

    • Exactly, they can target all the ads they want, they are going to be ignored and on the rare off chance they might put up an ad for something I want and end up getting then surely it's a win-win, although it probably wouldn't be through whatever ad but still.

      • ... they can target all the ads they want, they are going to be ignored...

        In the meantime, they make billions in profit. Who cares about what you do anyway?

        • ... they can target all the ads they want, they are going to be ignored...

          In the meantime, they make billions in profit. Who cares about what you do anyway?

          Facebook cares, or so it would seem, they and a whole shit-ton of their customers. Why else would Facebook be trying to out do the NSA in achieving 1984 level surveillance? The fact that Cambridge Analytics may have been a major factor in swaying the US elections has only had the effect of new customers beating down Facebook's door with a battering ram and Facebooks marketing team trying to think of every single possible way of monetising what they know about people. Also keep in mind that you don't have to

        • So fb are getting paid to serve up ads that get ignored. So what, I'm not paying them. Advertisers can sling all the money around in the hope of what works. When the NSA was doing it it was all fighting terrists and think of the childrens now that fb are trying to get you to click on shit links its end of world apparently, even though fb are far from the biggest or worst players in this game. They only thing thats actually changed is they think they have a method to advertise more stuff you might actually w

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gnick ( 1211984 )

        they can target all the ads they want, they are going to be ignored

        It sure seems that way, but companies are spending a shitload of $$ betting that we're paying attention. You might not click the ad; you might think it scrolled by without registering; but they're betting big that they got in your head just a little.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sinij ( 911942 )
      On one hand I don't want to see discrimination of any kind, so turning people down is a big no-no. On other hand, when dealing with advertising, it is understandable when businesses want to target most profitable clients.

      For example, is it discrimination when health insurance choose not to advertise with cancer survivors (on average such people make more claims)?

    • What can be marketed to a Catholic in full despair over 58 genders?

    • considered? that is literally exactly what they do, rofl. you can see all the deductions they have made about your personality like 5 clicks into the privacy/ads area of the account dashboard.

    • Maybe on CNN with their readers. But on Slashdot I think going assumption is outfits like Facebook try manipulating every piece of info on a user to target stupid ads.

      The point is that even CNN readers still don't understand the power they give a walled garden site that controls all you see and hear and can continiously test your reactions to their generated content. Facebook has built this ability at scale.

      If you've clicked a 100 Like buttons Facebook likely knows more about you than your immediate family.

  • Don't the big players already do this to a degree? I search for "underwear" online and then for the next 6 months see a thousand underwear ads on different sites. It's creepy and annoying. Profiling a personality is just a generalization of the technique.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Whenever co-workers are away from their desks, I do a quick search for "happy ending gay massage parlor" from their computer and then close the tab.

  • It looks like you might be psycho (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Given your personality profile, here are some ads from the NRA.

  • Facebook Has Considered Profiling Its Users' Personalities and Using the Information To Sell to Employers, Government, Insurance companies, Landlords, Lawyers, Universities etc...
  • You seem depressed... depressed people seem to be more likely to buy, rope + ladder combinations. Razor blades, and sleeping pills. You seem angry... check out Joes gunshop You seem insecure. Check out this new SUV

  • fail (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The intense turning of the blind eye that advertising execs do is astonishing. I have never met a human who has click on an add on purpose, not even one person I have asked has ever done it except on accident which they quickly click out of. Yet billions of dollars are literally wasted on fake advertising, it is fake because any metric used to promote it is a lie. Facebook is one huge lie, the people there lie about what they are doing, it is amazing that almost all people on Facebook are so happy, their li

  • I do a search for something, lets say a car part. I find it, I buy it. Done. Now, I get ads for the next three months from people trying to sell me this same part. You're wasting your time and money, folks.

    But by the time I might need another part for my shitbox, the advertisers have forgotten what model I drive.

  • they're not doing this already and just not calling it that then, well, I've got some lovely beachfront property in Nebraska I'd like to sell you.

  • Website found to be doing the thing it was designed to do the whole time!

    next you are going to tell me that google uses my search history to target ads - the very ads they run next to my results!!

  • A number of large universities, worldwide, have ploughed $millions into research on learning analytics in the past decade. The most cited paper, from Purdue University that reported a minor success in reducing the number of "at risk" student dropouts (Purdue Horizons project), turned out to be a simple statistical error. Nobody yet knows how to effectively predict what people are going to do based on their internet usage data, even when they spend an awful lot of time online studying, working, and socialisi

  • Long before 2012, Raytheon was building intelligence software to mine the social media sites. As mentioned in this article [pcmag.com] they built a large-scale system for the government in 2010. A review of their research contracts in the years leading up to that shows that personality classification and psychological disorder diagnosis using social media are both big business for them. This patent likely steps all over the black projects at Raytheon which came much sooner in the timeline.
  • If you go to your ad settings, it shows how FB thinks you align politically. It has me listed as "very liberal" at the moment.

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