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Comment by mbesto | Hacker News Reader

> And the FB algorithm already takes in 1000s of black box factors that are going to work better than some unproven personality score hogwash.

1. My understanding is that CA wasn't just executing FB ads. Is your assumption that this was their only technique?

2. Are you aware of the specific techniques CA used?

3. What would be the purpose of CA obtaining the data then?

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1) That kind of targeting is even less useful outside of FB. You can upload gmail addresses to Google to target, or use something like LiveRamp to target on display networks, but both options suck compared to FB.

2) Nothing beyond whats publically available.

3) It's not unusual to test different audiences, I've definitely tested all sorts. I'm sure thats how it started for Cambridge. Of course now, tin pot dictatorships hire them all around the world now to be basically a subpar FB agency, so they're happy with the PR.

So are you saying CA wasn't effective at all? Or just as effective as any other agency is/could have been. I'm confused...

CA as an agency might be effective, but this big data scrape is not part of that (beyond marketing themselves as nefarious propagandists to skeezy buyers).

I would say there’s no evidence whatsoever which would tell us whether CA was more or less effective than any other agency might have been.

> 1) That kind of targeting is even less useful outside of FB. You can upload gmail addresses to Google to target, or use something like LiveRamp to target on display networks, but both options suck compared to FB.

Both google and FB are financially incentivized to provide as much granularity in targeting as possible so they can charge more money to advertisers, who'll get a better return and get promoted. All up until the point that it becomes a liability. Thats the line they're walking - you can totally target quite a few things that end up correlating to say, neurotic people, if you know your audience is neurotic people. You have enough of the dataset at that point.

>who'll get a better return

Or so the story goes. Is it actually true that tighter audience restrictions (targeting) produce better returns?

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