How I Pranked My Roommate with Eerily Targeted Facebook Ads | Hacker News Reader

How I Pranked My Roommate with Eerily Targeted Facebook Ads

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343 pointsmanualwise46 comments

I feel like it stopped being "well played" when his roommate called him out and he just lied about it. At that point, there's nothing clever moving forward, other than the fact that he can apparently lie convincingly to a friend. Maybe that's just my "prank ethics" though.

It's a white lie that became apparent to the roommate as soon as the next ad was shown. It added comedy to the joke, in my opinion. Did the lie hurt anyone?

Well, it's not for sure, but arguably. The author seems to think he was on the cusp of it, at least:

>> I was afraid that if I didn’t end the torture he might need psychiatric treatment.

It didn't sound like it became apparent to the roommate shortly thereafter. According to the article, it was at least a week later, after the Snowden news broke and the roommate apparently became paranoid.

I'm assuming that the report of paranoia and the sentence "I was afraid that if I didn’t end the torture he might need psychiatric treatment" is comedic hyperbole, but I cease giving any "prank credit" after the roommate explicitly and correctly called the author out as the source of the ads.

It isn't about hurting anyone, it is about having some pride as a trickster/troll. You played a good prank, your roommate figured it out. Time to move on. Anyone can lie through their teeth, that's not clever at that point.

It may not have hurt anyone. But a good rule to live by is: If you find yourself considering lying, then you have made some poor choices somewhere along the line. Every time you find yourself wanting to lie, think about it, and you may come to realize this is a solid rule to try to live by.

I'm actually not opposed to lying as part of a prank. The issue I have is lying when the target essentially says "oh, haha, you're pranking me, right?" At that point, the prankster should just say "yep, I got you good, the end."

or if you're committed to the bit, play it coy and deny it in a way that makes it obvious you're lying.

Your grandmother buys you an ugly sweater. Six months later, close to death, she asks you if you like the sweater she got you.

I don't like this prank.

Thanks for the honest response.

> Maybe that's just my "prank ethics" though.

Upvoted. It's not just you. "Pranking" someone while lying through your teeth is something I'd expect my 6y.o. to do, not grown ups.

I think lying turns it from a prank and into a scam. A prank shouldn't require fraud to work.

It's like the show Punked, the best ones (thinking the kid from Malcolm in the Middle) relied entirely on the victim getting tunnel vision. If Franky had just been "yeah this is a prank" and it required someone to say "no, no its not" it kills the funny.

Remember those shows are edited, though.

Yes definitely, but it'd be hard to edit out a guy looking around for the cameras, and IIRC there was an episode of Punked where exactly that happened and they got called out, someone shouted "where the fuck is Ashton?" and ran around until they found a camera man.

That was the main reason they stopped. There was a hidden camera show in the UK (all I remember is a guy with a huge phone shouting in awkward public places like a library) that the same happened. Their third season was in random places in Europe because they kept getting called out.

Hm - a lot of comments here seem to suggest that your prank ethics are sound- but I think a lot has changed in recent years. With the proliferation of Nathan for You, #goating, College Humor prank wars, youtube shows, etc - when weird things begin to happen, my reflexive response is almost immediately "This must be a prank." and to start accusing possible culprits in a spray and pray attempt to "figure out" the situation. If the pranker fessed up immediately, then there wouldnt be much of a prank.

With prankees increasingly guarded, maybe there should be some leeway in this rule.

Yes. In general I still don't think it's fair play to not admit when confronted, but the fact that the prankee was also a pranker, and ultimately said "well played" and characterized the earlier denial as "OP and gf played it cool" means that OP was just calibrated to the prankee's expectations.

On the one hand, yeah in general I would agree. But if you care to re-read the introduction of the story, these guys were made for each other, and knew they could take it that far.

Better might've been to not flat-out deny it, but rather take his side in amazement and bewilderment, "OMG that is creepy", ignoring the accusation and then change the subject.

The reason that Facebook changed their policy to disallow targeting to a very small audience is because of this paper http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1066&c...

It studies the same problem as the author here exploited, but goes a lot farther to try and infer things about the targeted individual from the analytics that FB provides to the advertiser. The paper won the Privacy Enhancing Technologies award.

That was back in 2010. If the author succeeded anyway, it seems that Facebook was careless in their implementation of the fix.

Or they don't really care.

In this case they used Custom Audience Targeting which is different to what's used in the paper. CAT is advertising based on a list of personally identifiable information about your "targets" that you supply, which can include user IDs, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, etc. I can't confirm but suspect no limit is required for this since you already have their personal data.

As an aside, an interesting use of this system I've seen in the Internet marketing world is to buy e-mail or phone number lists from list vendors and use them to create custom audiences in Facebook. You can't e-mail them because that's spam and you'll be busted very quickly, but using them as fodder for custom audiences on platforms like Facebook is a way of laundering the info, in a sense. (I've not tried it myself but thought the idea was clever.)

Interesting. Could one use this to harass an ex? Because unless these sorts of ads are flaggable, I bet that will happen, whether unintentionally ("Dear Angelina, I miss you and I know you have seen this 53 times") or intentionally ("YOU HORRIBLE DEMON BIRCH %$@#%$!!!").

There are hundreds of examples where privacy could be violated and misused. This is why (or at least the negative PR is why) Facebook has attempted to remove the ability. Also are FB ads ever not flaggable/reportable?

My thought process went down a related path but found a completely different destination.

"Your ex is much happier now and hopes that you're happy too but if you're not...Sorry about your luck."

Worth noting: you can no longer target based on user IDs (unless you obtained it through a Facebook app): https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=1020254...

You could use this for birthdays, anniversaries, special events...imagine once facebook takes over the web, we can pay them to make someone's day on the internet special.

Thank you for coming up with a much less creepy/prankish application. I think it totally would be cool to have my wife's ad feed on our anniversary (or her birthday, etc) be sponsored by me. :)

Today I learned that facebook adds can be targetted to a list of specific known individuals, not just demographics.

It never occured to me that this would be.

Sort of makes sense, where some companies might have a list of customers' emails but they want to get around those pesky spam filters.

Reminds me of this post - http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/05/a-fb-ad-targeted...

To target just one person (in the new rules), rather than listing email addresses and only targeting one gender, couldn’t you upload one genuine and 19 fake email addresses? Or does FB filter your list based on those emails it recognises as users... in which case, is this a security hole where you can test an email against FB to see if that user’s registered by submitting 19 genuine addresses and 1 to-be-verified address to see if it’s accepted or not?

I assume it has to be real users on facebook. The author of the article suggest uploading 1 user targetted, and then 19 real users that's in a specific group, and exclude that group...

Facebook could close this loophole by saying that the group targetted must be >20.. but even then I still think this kind of work will still work.. simply target people who liked Adblock or something + your friend, and your friend may be the only person that sees this.

Or, bombard random people with Really Strange ads as collateral damage along with the pranking of one's friend. There are probably downsides to this, of course.

Well, there's no way to distinguish real users from "real" users - getting 19 sockpuppet accounts on FB is trivial, so just target them and your mark.

As a bonus, if the advertising is per-view and your 19 fake accounts never log in, then the price of advertising to 19+1 is the same as advertising just to the intended target.

If the list you upload can't be matched to real users you get a generic error message of the form "Unable to match, check your input."

I'm sure they verify the email addresses, but if you have a serious intent to prank/troll/harass a specific individual rather than just a casual desire then I imagine it can't be too difficult - otherwise advertising for narrow/niche markets would not be very effective.

> It began innocently enough with me snagging the email address he had listed on his Facebook profile, adding it into an Excel worksheet, and exporting it as a .CSV file.

This reminds me of the days when I'd get sent photos and screenshots embedded in Word documents.

heh. It seems a CSV containing an email address would be pretty simple. Maybe just a V file.

Is it me or has this site hijacked the scrolling and changed the speed?

It has. More and more sites do this nowadays.

Not sure how I feel about it. Sometimes it's executed well, sometimes not so much.

wait, can i send zuckerberg whatever messages i want through this? how much would that cost?

He probably uses adblock.

maybe facebook won't show him ads. no need for adblock

nit: the scrolling on this page is interesting. what is the intent?

An incredibly amusing anecdote. Very clever of you!

Nice try facebook...

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