Facebook to stop targeting ads at UK woman after legal fight
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
2. Enjoy increased quality of life
Easier said than done, but those are the only steps
I found it gives me just enough friction that most of the time, the impulse to open the app passes while I wait for the breath timer to run out. Simply using the OS screen time limit on its own is not really enough, because it's too easy to dismiss and override the block. Having a brief timer to help you consider whether my action is intentional or driven by anxiety or thoughtless boredom really helps.
My friends went through a phase in their 20's where they were comparing themselves to social media people. They all struggled with feeling inadequate.
I waited until my mid life crisis to do that. They're getting to do it again.
Fascinating.
(They don’t seem to do anything beyond gather some followers from her… maybe they’re DMing those followers through)
(I have the same experience with my dupes, except I’m not active, though I am more active than my dupes)
I once tried to create a new account with my real name in order to maintain Facebook Business Manager without using my private account. The new account was immediately locked until I added a phone number. I added my business number, which was immediately rejected. I added my personal number which immediately resulted in my private account being locked instead.
So I gave up and don’t use Facebook for my business.
I have an alternate profile that’s also under my real name which is 10+ years old, previously used to keep a distinction between friends and family, and it works just fine.
Everytime I open FB, and scroll a little, I feel like an outsider looking into a crazy circus of clown people. I don't get why others don't see what I see.
"I just graduated" - someone whose sibling I met 15 years ago, but whose name I wouldn't recognize without a picture attached
"So proud of my daughter" - a mother who attended a piano concert, couldn't wait to even get home before posting on fb, and will tell her family at dinner how many of her adult friends commented on it, whom none if her family care about.
<vacation selfie> - middle school classmate, or former colleague, who posts swiss climbing and bali surfing images every week, as if they had no life no work just money to burn.
"<long story>, so anyway, that's where I found this purse, please share and repost. You have to prove ownership by reciting the washing machine instructions on the label." - individual who has nothing happening in their life, so they make a blockbuster adventure out of someone's misfortune, rather than handing the purse to the reception in the restaurant where they found it.
Oh, and I always see ten new invitations from people, who would never contact me individually, to events those people know I would never attend, for the nth time despite me never having reacting before.l
The issue is not sharing little "uninteresting" things about your life, it’s sharing them with a random audience.
If what you’re saying works for you that’s fantastic! It absolutely didn’t work for me. My assessment is that I lack the discipline required.
||reddit.com^$document @@||reddit.com/r/*/comments/$document
It allows me to look at individual posts which lets me search and view specific answers, but blocks the lists of posts. I get the benefit of Reddit without getting sucked into the time wasting feed.
To all ya working on making these misery machines even more efficient - you never feel ashamed of yourself for what you do? Is the money really worth losing respect for oneself and others as a good human being? Or it attracts same crowd as founder - asocial high performing sociopaths who couldn't care less?
Not being on Facebook is burying your head in a hole? I mean, really, why say something like that?
My concern in doing this would be that there is an authentic profile out there under my real name, now entirely (and effectively forever) beyond my control.
I'm not a layperson, and I don't think the problem is collecting info.
It's hard to legislate "you cannot collect any info about people ever", when people are free to choose to have an account with them.
The same is served by "you have to target >= 100 people for an ad"
Regardless of whether people choose to conversate by telling me what to Google, instead of coming with curiosity and/or contributions.
The same thought process that leads to commentators being confused why Apple rejected someone's app for having a privacy policy of "I don't collect data" applies here.
I'm glad a less naive, and non-absolutist, approach has gotten tangible results, even if it'll take a few years for it to be common wisdom rather than disagreeable to look back on the 2010s and say so.
The article we're discussing, and attendant court decision, is about someone with a Facebook account and the ads in their "social media news feed", not someone without an account who was being profiled.
Did I miss something?
Tangentially, I'd also like to, again, gently, push back on the idea that it's conducive to community health to use an accusatory interlocution approach, especially one that relies on mind-reading to make the accusations.
To provide explanation as to why I am comfortable claiming that, some excerpts from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:
- "...Converse curiously; don't cross-examine."
- "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less"
- "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
- "Please don't post shallow dismissals...A good critical comment teaches us something."
"It's hard to legislate "you cannot collect any info about people ever", when people are free to choose to have an account with them."
Implied to me that you were saying that the information they were gathering was only coming from people who have an account with them. I don't have an account with them, and I'm pretty sure they're collecting all sorts of data on me (despite having every known Meta hostname in my /etc/hosts file pointing to 127.1).
But reading your sentence again, it looks like you were saying something a little different. It seems like I might have misunderstood your point at first glance. My apologies for the snark.
Also does Facebook actually sell data to anyone?
Except that is what O'Carroll just did.
If Meta disagrees with O'Carroll's claims then why settle. Why not fight.
Facebook used to have a marketing soundbite/Zuckerberg quote something like "Facebook will always be free."
Now Meta claims it is not free.
BTW, the "Careless People" book is available for free in audio book form, read by the author, from many particpating public libraries.
Meta and most companies will settle lawsuits when they believe the rewards of continuing the lawsuit outweigh the cost of settling the lawsuit. There is no connection to whether they disagree or agree with the claim of the lawsuit.
Companies will settle if the costs of going to trail outweigh the benefits like I said in my original comment. To clarify, the cost benefit analysis includes more than just money as things like reputation and precedent are important too. The reason for settling is sometimes because they think there is a good possibility to lose if it goes to trail (meaning low potential benefit) but not always and this is not even the most common reason to settle. In the article being cited facebook is agreeing "to stop targeting ads at UK woman after legal fight". This is an individual settlement and not a group settlement. Targeting ads at a single user has very low benefits for Facebook (tens to hundreds of dollars) which will not even pay for a single hour of a lawyer's time. It would be absurd for Facebook to counter sue Ms. O'Carrol and counter suits in general are quite rare.
To provide some approximate numbers:
- ~90% of cases settle
- ~1% of cases involve a counter suit
- Facebook legal cost for in house counsel appears to be in the range of $250 per hour equivalent
- Facebook average annual revenue per user in Europe is about $25
- Ads is a substance, very invasive and toxic, that alters the behavior of its users. They consume ads unwillingly, when the latter is mixed into their drinks and food. Ads are often tailored to different groups of users.
- Advertisers are the manufacturers of ads. They do extensive research into how to make the ads more invasive, and pay a lot to get the ads delivered to the users.
- Content is a type of food that's designed to be highly addictive. It's mostly made of sugar, artificial colors to make it look appealing, and of certain chemicals to invoke strong emotions, usually negative. While content isn't designed to be toxic, it is. The prolonged use of content destroys the ability to focus and deregulates control of emotions. Its users become impulsive, with a very short attention span. These weaknesses make it easy to serve them ads.
- Big Tech is the international ads cartel. It creates so called social network platforms that attract users in billions, profiles and tags them, manufactures content tailored to different groups, and lets advertisers serve ads for a fee.
Because this entire industry works at the mental and emotional levels, as of 2025 its activity isn't considered a crime.
My pet peeve is that many community organizations (such as a board game club and a game development club at my Uni) use Facebook and Instagram as their only communication channels. That kind of platform opens you up to so much bullshit, bullying and cringe (all these girls who look the same who supposedly want to follow me) You might be sharing content which is really wholesome but you have no idea what is getting served right next to it. It's rare to see an organization like this one
https://fingerlakesrunners.org/
where you won't find anything that isn't about running, where moderations can squash things that aren't relevant without cries of "censorship", etc. I wouldn't even mind if a site like that had ads for running shoes or Wegmans or local car dealerships but personalized ads and other recommendations can be so toxic and not things you want associated with your organization or your brand.
My country’s consulate in NYC posts important news only to Facebook. That is a problem.
I don’t care if the lost revenue means worse roads and some companies bankrupted, I just want to see the tree behind the billboards. I’m tired to fight my own mind when commuting between walls of videos ads. Targeted or not, 2025 ads are a blight.
As far as I can see that doesn't alter anything in this judgement.
> The Meta spokesperson said the company was "exploring the option" of offering a similar service to UK users and would "share further information in due course."
At some point you have to ponder wether the right choices were made when you write up entire chapters of your life on an ad-broker's website.
This bias will be implemented in LLMs sooner or later. Combined with the current misunderstanding of "AI" by the general population, it makes me worried about the future of misinformation.
"And here's some more content about your favourite band/movie/TV show/influencer. And now, some reels. Aren't those cats cute? But anyway. Here's a reel that looks unobjectionable but subtly makes a political point you should definitely think about. Would you like to know more?"
AI has the potential to make this much more effective.
Certain noteworthy historical figures from Germany would have been absolutely delighted.
I didn't lost any money because I blocked the card. In about more than a month I receive a notification grom my bank that an ATM transaction was tried but it failed.
Oh, and get someone from Stanford to be co-founder. Instant legitimacy and money.
It could just as well be free without personalized ads but with regular advertisement.
As far as I know Facebook is extremely profitable.
> She said the adverts she got "suddenly started changing within weeks to lots of baby photos and other things - ads about babies and pregnancy and motherhood".
> "I just found it unnerving - this was before I'd even told people in my private life, and yet Facebook had already determined that I was pregnant," she continued.
Facebook likely knew she was pregnant by covertly eavesdropping on her life via her phones microphone. When these companies started using their apps to eavesdrop on your entire life via your phone, I immediately deleted them. No way is that creeptastic shit allowed in my life. I mean, imagine talking about doritos in a nostalgic context only to have amazon suggest you buy them when you open the app. Deleted. The only apps on my phone are banking and utility. Bye Felicia.
What's more likely happening is far more boring: humans as a whole are very predictable, and the metadata that Facebook et al have access to is more than enough to identify these patterns.
To _really_ try and test this, you could download the Facebook (or Amazon or whatever) app, and (within earshot of your phone) consistently talk about some completely random purchaseable item that you have no intent to purchase and have never otherwise indicated you have an interest in. Chances are you will not get ads for it.
To make it less likely you pick something that is subconsciously on your mind (and thus able to be picked up via your metadata), try playing word association games to pick the product in question. E.g. banana > yellow > raincoat > weather > digital thermometer
That's the trick isn't it. How do you choose a random purchasable item without indicating interest in.
Is it because it was something you saw recently, but don't want to buy? How many (targetting) similar people near you also saw that and may want to buy?
How much is that ad being shown to you now, but you hadn't noticed because you weren't interested in the product?
It's certainly possible to carefully craft an experiment, but it's not easy. And a poorly crafted expirement won't show much.
That's quite an assumption to make. The very famous example of data tracking and creepy correlations is the story about the supermarket sending baby ads to a household based on nothing more than their purchasing habits.
People change the way they act in measurable ways for much less intense psychological events than pregnancy. Just the grocery prices you look up (and that doesn't include things like pregnancy tests) is enough to determine likelihood of pregnancy, let alone an app you take with you all day and possibly spend hours scrolling through. The amount of data you're passively giving off to these apps is enormous.
I have yet to see any evidence of spying through microphones by large companies. I know some small ad network got caught doing so, but not the big suspects everyone is (rightfully) afraid of. The Google phone I'm carrying would've spawned much more relevant ads than "buy a new €200k electric car" and "where to apply for welfare" right after each other if it actually listened in.
While a fun anecdote, it really shouldn't be taken seriously as something that actually happened.
https://medium.com/@colin.fraser/target-didnt-figure-out-a-t...
Most of the Medium comments are calling them out on this:
>Title: "Target didn’t figure out a teenager was pregnant before her father did, and that one article that said they did was silly and bad." A clear assertion. A solid claim. One of the first paragraphs: "I won’t belabor this since we can’t actually know, but the anecdote about the father calling the store and talking to the manager is probably just not true. " So, a person who contradicts himself right in the beginning uses articles that are being hyperbolic as proof that the articles got it all wrong. Smells a bit like double standards, no? And the point of the conversation is less about accuracy of the findings and more about such models being in place. I mean, Facebook did this, right? https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/facebook-categorize-users-... And I'm not sure but there was this little company, very obscure, not sure anyone heard of it. Cambridge Analytica? Again, very obscure.
After all, at any given time, like 11% of women are either pregnant, will soon become or have recently been pregnant.
I assume insurance or something sells the data.
For one, they were incredibly paranoid about customer data privacy at the time, because of the famous incident of an unknown entity siphoning off data from some of their in store payment terminals for an unknown length of time. They instituted barriers and strict need to know basis access to everything touching customer history.
The amount of internal systems and departments that would have had to cooperate in order to start trying to sell a customer pregnancy related products because another arm of the company detected an individual customer was pregnant just boggles my mind, it could not and would happen at Target.
Did you? From the article:
>[...]The Forbes writer who rehashes the anecdote even describes it as “so good that it sounds made up.” Indeed.
>But this is an easy criticism and beside the point, so for the remainder of this article, let’s suppose that the anecdote is true.
The bulk of the objections in the article are that a single instance of Target correctly predicting a pregnancy isn't enough evidence to conclude they have some sort of a galaxy-brained AI that can predict pregnancies before the mothers even know. It's far more plausible it randomly guessed someone was pregnant, and got lucky.
The comment you quoted has the same issue. It gets way too hung up on the first part, ignores everything else the author wrote, and then tries to move the goalposts to "the conversation is [...] more about such models being in place". That's a huge cope. It's fairly obvious how concerned we should be about such models is proportional to how accurate they are, and the author is trying to harness that with the Target anecdote. Nobody would care if the story was "24 year old man got sent ads for Zyn, without telling Target that he smoked".
Spying through your microphone ala 1960's FBI wiretap is not worse than reading credit card history, location data, google searches, etc. Sure, it sounds more spooky, but probably they would have less data if they only listened through the microphone. That's probably an improvement over our current situation.
Source? Because so far this claim has been debunked every time.
I assume you are aware how Android and iOS have a visual indicator to show that the microphone is active? Have you analyzed any network traffic that included unexpected voice samples? Please, explain yourself.
It can easily explain how people with iPhones are being eavesdropped on: "those indicators aren't trustworthy". According to this theory, the microphone in an iPhone is active despite the indicator not being displayed. That's identical to the Android theory.
To extend the theory to Facebook, you'd need to assume one of these:
(1) The unreliability of the indicator on Android is a matter of incompetence on the part of Google, and Facebook is exploiting it.
(2) Google has a privileged stealth-microphone-access permission, and Facebook has negotiated for access to it.
A: You know phone microphones aren't secretly taping us because indicators display when they're active.
B: Those indicators aren't reliable.
A: That can't explain how iPhone users would get taped.
Where did that come from?
It is always a question of trust, but after more than a decade of phones they are pretty determined to earn trust. I have not seen any trustworthy reports of a secret always on microphone. Just the occasional recording made after a misheard trigger word or button which is an issue being further secured year by year.
Amazon on the other hand…
CMG Responds to Reports About Discontinued Active Listening Product
As we stated before, CMG businesses have never listened to any conversations nor had access to anything beyond third-party aggregated, anonymized, and fully encrypted data sets that can be used for ad placement. The information referenced in recent stories is based on outdated materials for a product that CMG Local Solutions no longer sells (although the product never listened to customers, it has long been discontinued to avoid misperception). CMG Local Solutions markets a wide range of advertising tools. Like other advertising companies, some of those tools include third-party vendor products powered by data sets sourced from users by digital publishers and other applications and then packaged and resold to data servicers. Advertising data based on voice and other data is collected by these platforms and devices under the terms and conditions provided by those apps and accepted by their users. This data can then be sold to third-party companies and converted into anonymized information for advertisers. This anonymized data then is resold by numerous advertising companies.
Advertising data based on voice and other data is collected by these platforms and devices under the terms and conditions provided by those apps and accepted by their users.