Is Facebook outing gay people through targeted advertising?


Privacy concerns surrounding Facebook are nothing new- indeed, at this point, one of the first things that springs to mind alongside the world’s most popular social network is the frequent news that somehow, somewhere Facebook is currently leaking some scarily intimate information about you to the internet in general.

Apps mine info, lawyers use Facebook to get you in legal trouble (and judges smack you down for violating due process) and overly chatty friends reveal more than you’d care to through tagged pics. Now a study is making the rounds suggesting that your behaviors on the site can both reveal your sexuality and that this information might be distributed to third parties without your knowledge.

Microsoft and the Max Planck Insitute had researchers create six fake Facebook accounts- one for a male interested in males, one for a female interested in females, two for males interested in females and two for females interested in males. All accounts were set for a location of Washington DC and as 25 years old. While the ads for the ostensible lesbians and straight people were much the same, the ones for gay men were frequently different, and didn’t often relate to the user’s sexuality. TG Daily quoted the researchers’ explanation of why this could be problematic for users:

“The danger with such ads, unlike the gay bar ad where the target demographic is blatantly obvious, is that the user reading the ad text would have no idea that by clicking it he would reveal to the advertiser both his sexual-preference and a unique identifier (cookie, IP address, or email address) if he signs up on the advertiser’s site,” say the researchers.

“Furthermore, such deceptive ads are not uncommon; indeed exactly half of the 66 ads shown exclusively to gay men (more than 50 times) during our experiment did not mention ‘gay’ anywhere in the ad text.”

Thus, to use the medical school as an example, if a gay man clicks on the ad and mentions that he saw it on Facebook, the school now knows his sexuality.

You’ve probably experienced some unsettling targeted advertising from Facebook before. Does this information give your further pause, or are the benefits of using Facebook as you please worth the slight risk of being outed for any manner of personal attribute?

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