[takeda]

There is an update. He mentions that they restricted to minimum of 20 people, but there is a loophole, because you can select criteria on that group.

He gives example that if your want to target a guy friend, you can create a group of 1 male and 19 female friends and then create ad targeting just males to get around it.

[amenghra]

... or create 19 fake accounts (or pick 19 random people you don't care about) and then target'em all.

[nojvek]

The fact that you can do this make me very paranoid. I am so glad I don't use facebook. I'm pretty sure with the rise of face recognition, object recognition and NLP you can create insanely targeted ads that are almost ransomware by crawling people's social profiles and correlating them with hacked datasets.

[saurik]

How is this different from the ability to send someone an email? I just don't understand the concern of being able to send ads to one person other than "random non-technical people will not expect that and think it is a ghost".

[jnky]

I don't know how precise the ad targeting exactly, but what if you narrow the base group down to your 19 fake accounts and your target user.

If you could the further filter your ad based on gender (as mentioned above), personal interests or other private data, you may be able to use your ad impressions to figure out things about an unsuspecting person.

I'd consider that a huge breach of my privacy.

[CRConrad]

But anyone who has your e-mail address -- a semi-public identifier, like your name or Facebook page -- can send you an e-mail. Is that also a "huge breach of [your] privacy"?

Is addressing you by name when one bumps into you on the street -- "Hey, Junky, did you hear about..." -- also a "huge breach of [your] privacy"?

That was the GP's question: How is this (targeted FB ad) any more a "huge breach of [your] privacy" than sending you an e-mail? (Or, my addition, than talking to you in the street?)

A weird and hugely convoluted way of talking to you, yes -- compared to, say, just posting a comment on your FB "wall" (do they still call it that?) -- but still: Just a way of talking to you, like e-mail or a Facebook wall posting.

[zitterbewegung]

I saw a demo of an app using Microsoft's Computer Vision api that would figure out your demographics from facial recognition and show you ads targeted to your demographic.

[fineline]

If you don't use FB why are you paranoid about this? I don't, and I'm not.