[junto]

Cool script.

My hack is to live in a country where the local language is not my own, and not the one I have set in my Facebook settings.

As a result, Facebook rarely has advertisements that can target me, because my language has been filtered out by the advertisers.

When one does appear, it’s nearly always in the local language, so I’m kind of deaf to it and I’m not going to actively respond to anyway.

Luckily they haven’t figured that out yet, even though I’ve been an Facebook user for many years.

[stavros]

My hack is to live in a country that forces Facebook to give me an opt-out, and then I click "no" when Facebook asks.

[useEffect]

my hack is just to not have facebook

[willcipriano]

My hack is being just young enough that having a Facebook would make me feel old.

[gerdesj]

You have rather succinctly noted that sodding huge walled off communities come and go, with time. ::FAC3:B00C: is already very old school and largely irrelevant. They just haven't noticed yet.

Whither Geocities and Compuserve?

[39896880]

Facebook makes shadow profiles of you anyway

[somat]

Then facebook gets to track my shadow self.

[scubbo]

Why would a person who objects to Facebook tracking them via their actual profile not object to Facebook tracking them via inferences?

[serf]

because the far-parent problem was 'facebook has ads that target me.'

an easy way to avoid the problem of seeing ads on facebook is.. to avoid facebook.

yes, this doesn't solve the privacy and ad-affiliate network problem -- but that wasn't the stated problem.

[bravetraveler]

I'll answer but I don't think you want one/it... They're different. That's why. Simple.

One you're giving them information/still seeing ads

The other, they're guessing and you're free from the mind rot. Distance surely hurts their accuracy.

Can't stop them guessing but you can stop being their authoritative source. You've heard the whole, "we're in charge of our response, not the problem", right?

[inferiorhuman]

I have a hard time believing that Facebook does a particularly good job with its shadow profiles. They can't even figure out which continent I live on or narrow my age down to more than a couple decades off.

For the times I need to wade thru the muck mbasic + adblock means the only ads I see are recommended groups. Those are usually history geeks focused on cities thousands of miles away from anywhere I've been in the past decade.

[m1117]

But I'm addicted to the feed!

[Systemmanic]

What country has this? Sounds great.

[stavros]

Any EU country. Meta is also forced to ask you before associating profiles between its properties, eg Facebook and Instagram.

[Galaco]

Same situation for me. Basically the only ads I ever see in my native language are for American expat tax services (I’m not American, have never visited the continent and have never expressed interest in doing so).

Sometimes I wonder just how good this adtech really all is when the best they can do is figure out I speak English (browser language) and live not in an English speaking country (IP address) and just assume therefore I am American.

[lancesells]

That's probably less to do with Meta and their tech than a marketer setting up their ads in the way you describe (language: english, country: yours). I'm not sure you can even target nationality at all.

[namaria]

A lot of the filtering of whom to show ads to is heuristics to try and target 'high value costumers'. Getting target with very irrelevant ads might just mean you are considered low value by most advertisers so you get served ads from advertisers willing to pay very little per impression.

I'd take as a signal your online cloaking is working as intended. I often get very random ads and recommendations in languages I don't even speak so I think my online anonimity fu is working as intended.

Source - worked with ad tech a few years ago.

[Tade0]

I set my language to English (Pirate) a long time ago to similar effect.

The option has been removed since, making me part of an ever shrinking community of essentially random people - not a particularly interesting target for advertisers.