According to recent research, Facebook still stands collecting the personal data of young people and addressing teens with “Surveillance advertising”. Let’s find out the details.
Facebook and the “advertising surveillance” of young people
Over the course of the summer, Facebook announced it would allow to advertisers only to target advertisements to young people. In September, the company’s global head of security Antigone Davis he reaffirmed this when he testified before the United States Senate.
“We have very limited publicity for young people,” he said. “You can actually, only now, address something to a young person based on his gender, age or location.”
The new revelations suggest that Facebook no longer allows advertisers to target young people directly. Instead, it appears to be using i data of their online behavior to power a “Delivery System” AI to optimize targeted ads for them.
Replacing “advertiser-selected targeting” with “optimization selected by a machine learning delivery system” is not a demonstrable improvement for young people. Facebook is still using the large amount of data it collects about young people to determine which of them are most likely to be vulnerable to a particular ad.
This is what he wrote, in an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, a international coalition of civil liberties and youth protection organizations.
The open letter also stated that the practice was particularly worrying. Optimized targeting can include things like ads regarding weight loss addressed to adolescents with emerging eating disorders.
“Facebook has once again put its interest first and it may have actually made things worse for young people,” said Dr. Rys Farthing, director of Children’s Policy at the digital threat organization Reset Australia, who led research. “They seem unable to act in the interest of young people.”
Currently Facebook has not yet responded to The Independent’s request for comment and has yet to comment publicly accuses him.