Facebook Managers Trash Their Own Ad Targeting In Unsealed Remarks

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept: Facebook is currently waging a PR campaign purporting to show that Apple is seriously injuring American small businesses through its iOS privacy features. But at the same time, according to allegations in recently unsealed court documents, Facebook has been selling them ad targeting that is unreliable to the point of being fraudulent. The documents feature internal Facebook communications in which managers appear to admit to major flaws in ad targeting capabilities, including that ads reached the intended audience less than half of the time they were shown and that data behind a targeting criterion was "all crap." Facebook says the material is presented out of context.

They emerged from a suit currently seeking class-action certification in federal court. The suit was filed by the owner of Investor Village, a small business that operates a message board on financial topics. Investor Village said in court filings that it decided to buy narrowly targeted Facebook ads because it hoped to reach "highly compensated and educated investors" but "had limited resources to spend on advertising." But nearly 40 percent of the people who saw Investor Village's ad either lacked a college degree, did not make $250,000 per year, or both, the company claims. In fact, not a single Facebook user it surveyed met all the targeting criteria it had set for Facebook ads, it says. The complaint features Facebook documents indicating that the company knew its advertising capabilities were overhyped and underperformed. A "February 2016 internal memorandum" sent from an unnamed Facebook manager to Andrew Bosworth, a Zuckerberg confidant and powerful company executive who oversaw ad efforts at the time, reads, "[I]nterest precision in the US is only 41% -- that means that more than half the time we're showing ads to someone other than the advertisers' intended audience. And it is even worse internationally. We don't feel we're meeting advertisers' interest accuracy expectations today." The lawsuit goes on to quote unnamed "employees on Facebook's ad team" discussing their targeting capabilities circa June 2016.

"Interest" and "behavior" are two key facets of the data dossiers Facebook compiles on us for advertisers; according to the company, the former includes things you like, "from organic food to action movies," while the latter consists of "behaviors such as prior purchases and device usage." The complaint also cites unspecified internal communications in which "[p]rivately, Facebook managers described important targeting data as 'crap' and admitted accuracy was 'abysmal.'" Facebook has said in its court filings that these quotes are presented out of context.

Big tech is bad for you

[Quakeulf]

Come to /. instead. At least you know they will have limited impact on your life.

Re:

[ShanghaiBill]

Both companies can go to hell

You can take the cynical and nihilistic view that all companies are equally evil, but that is not true.

Apple's core business is selling hardware.

Facebook's core business is selling advertising.

One is inherently more of a threat to your privacy than the other.

Re:

[CHduckie]

I agree with the notion that they're different companies, however, it should not be overlooked that hardware and software is often closely tied together, and Apple does indeed sell software services, with some arguably more ideal, but nonetheless deserving of scrutiny, policies. The same way Facebook technically sells hardware, a popular example being their new Oculus headsets, which they've seemingly subsidized (and put off many) through the requirement of a legitimate Facebook account.

What about today?

[aaarrrgggh]

I get that it was complete crap in 2016, but very curious how far they have come since. All they really need is enough accuracy to justify the cost... if the market won’t support a higher cost point why would they bother to improve accuracy? But, for the business targetting 1%’ers with Facebook ads on a low budget... maybeyou fall into the “a fool and his money will soon be separated” category.

Re: What about today?

[RazorSharp]

But the problem is that they tell their customers who buy ads that the targeting is highly effective. That sounds like false advertising at best, fraud at worst.

Re:

[aaarrrgggh]

...what do you expect from Facebook?

Re: What about today?

[Z00L00K]

Not very far.

People don't like getting targeted and only morons don't take precautions against it. Simplest would be to run multiple browsers. Especially now when Flash no longer is used then the isolation between browsers improves. So one for purchasing, one for junk browsing and one for banking.

And running adblockers and cookie deleters also destroys the tracking abilities. Advertisers will hate the upcoming firefox where there's site isolation so tgat trackers can't link uour browsing patterns even with

Re:

[luvirini]

Yes, except that most people do not do such. Almost everyone will just use "Facebook" or "Google" or such not a specific browser or such.. let alone switching browsers.

Re:

[ceoyoyo]

I don't think you even need to do that. Facebook is like a rat you can train. Just click on one type of ad occasionally and soon they'll all be that.

My Facebook feed is all bikinis and whiskey. Oh yeah, and family pictures.

The Telemetry.coN crash

[Malays2 bowman]

Please tell me the privacy invasion industry is going to crash hard soon!

50%

[Lehk228]

hitting 50% is really good, you basically can't do that with any other advertising except advertising a niche product within it's forum like advertising lathes in a turning magazine or advertising games on a gaming blog