[Atsuii]

We used to have access to individual demographic data for breaking down your analytics and ad targeting, as well as being able to target users based on their specific email address or phone number. We could also target your friends.

From memory this has now all been rolled up into cohort demographics and 'look-a-like' audiences so you can no longer break your data down by specific users demographic attributes or target ads by say an email list unless they are already your users (and it's used for specific types of ads; retargeting).

From memory some of the more unsettling breakdown/targets were

  - Ethnicity
  - Life events
  - Politics
  - Pages (so other businesses) they had liked

I worked for a pure play furniture retailer you used to be able to do things like buy email lists from price comparators of gas/eletricity/home insurance with additional data like your postcode and then upload it to facebook and specifically target everyone with a FB account under that email/phone number with furniture ads. As the assumption is that if your looking for gas/eletricity/home insurance your likely to be moving home or at least be a person who had some need for furniture.

Now they just use the facebook pixel to put you into look a like audiences because they can see you went to the home insurance website and the real estate website (they all have the pixel installed) and make the same broad assumptions we were previously making but on the cohort and not your specific unique identifier.

[yupper32]

That's... not that interesting? At least not on the Facebook side of things.

Why shouldn't I be able to advertise to people who have recently marked themselves as married, or who liked the Yankees facebook page?

[Atsuii]

You should be able to advertise to people that are Yankee fans on facebook, but you shouldn't be able to get John Doe's email address from the Yankees fan club directory (not on facebook) and directly target them with ads if they have zero relationship to your business.

You also shouldn't be able to upload a list of email addresses, target your ads to them, and then use Facebook's analytics to see how many of those people have divorces or an investment property via the segmentation analysis. Depending on how small that list is, a lot of that data starts getting very specific to an individual.

Facebook obviously also thought you shouldn't be able to do this since now you can't. Everything is now cohort and look-alikes.

Additionally your acting like Facebook is only putting you in the ‘recently married’ bucket if you marked yourself as married. Facebook is smarter than that, they are putting you in these buckets based on your messages, instagram activity, and browsing behaviour, not necessarily based on public information you expose in your profile.

[rawoke083600]

>- Ethnicity - Life events - Politics - Pages (so other businesses) they had liked

The above, is all frowned up (for the record, I 100% agree) what is interesting is, our civilization has evolved to frown up the above "categorizing" of people, but from that list (only ethnicity) is not "choose able" by the person.

I.e I can mostly choose when I get married and to whom and which party I support but I def cannot choose my race. Yet the above is all considered 'equally bad'.

Just something I noticed.