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Comment by xefer | Hacker News Reader

So I'm curious: have you tried removing details from your Facebook ad preferences?

On the desktop website go to: Settings | Ads | Your Interests. There is a huge ontology of various subjects that have been algorithmically assigned to you. If you remove these, I believe ads targeted to those interests should go away. I periodically just sweep them all clean so I have no interests. I get very few ads and those that I go get are completely generic. I never see anything that would seem creepily aware of who I am.

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You can actually find out why you are seeing a particular ad bt clicking on the three dots on the upper right, there is a menu item called “why am I seeing this” which will tell you how the advertisers is targeting you.

It also gives you the ability to hide ads like that in the future

It’s pretty good that they allow you to do that now, but it can’t retroactively remove those interests from the personal data they’ve already sold about you. So it fixes the smaller issue of what ads Facebook serves, but doesn’t address the larger issue of privacy.

FB doesn’t sell your data though, never has!

What they sell is the ability to target you based on it. But the data never leaves FBs servers!

So if you remove the tags from your settings, advertisers won’t be able to target you with them anymore

This isn’t the whole truth. Facebook doesn’t sell data, but Facebook’s Graph API combined with microtargeting ad groups allows third party applications that the user has authorized to gather and sell sensitive data to anyone they want. In many cases, the data does leave Facebook’s servers as soon as the action is taken.

You could argue this is the user’s own fault, but prior to Cambridge Analytica, there was very little public understanding of what “connecting” an app to Facebook really meant among the general population.

Also, just because Facebook doesn’t sell this data today does not mean they never will.

Sure, third parties can request access to the graph API by asking the user for permission.

But Facebook issnt selling that access! Access to the APIs is free.

Now users just giving any random app access is a whole different can of worms...you have the same issue on Android and iOS with permission dialogs...people worry about Amazon Alexa recording everything they say, but will give any app microphone/camera access to do just the same if the app creator is ill intended.

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