Status with Facebook 'interest-based' ads is complicated
Q. What’s this about Facebook opting users into ads across the rest of the Web based on their interests?
A. A blog post called “Awkward Conversation With Facebook” about this issue has gotten intense attention on Facebook and Twitter this week. Not all of it holds up on closer inspection, but the blame for any confusion must fall on Facebook for glossing over important differences in how two kinds of ads work.
Start with the ad-settings page that Parsons School of Design professor Dave Carroll tweeted about on Sunday. He spotted a new setting, “Ads on apps and websites off of the Facebook Companies,” on which the answer to “Can your Facebook ad preferences be used to show you ads on apps and websites off of the Facebook Companies?” had been set to “Yes.”
But Carroll had long ago changed a seemingly-redundant setting right above that -- labeled “Ads based on my use of websites and apps,” with its description “Can you see online interest-based ads from Facebook?”--to “No.”
The answer, as I could discern it after a 20-minute phone call and a 12-message e-mail thread with a Facebook spokesman, is that the two species of ads fly in separate orbits.
The first kind, governed by the “Ads based on my use of websites and apps,” is based not on what you do on Facebook, but on other sites that incorporate bits of the site: Facebook-linked comments such as the ones here, Like buttons, “social plug-ins” showing which friends have shared a post, and so on.
Those little outposts of Facebook now appear on enough sites to give the company a decent sense of your tastes. But you can opt out of that on the ad-settings page, and that will stick regardless of the new change.
That “Ads on apps and websites off of the Facebook Companies” setting, in turn, represents a belated addition of a control that wasn’t available two years ago. That’s when Facebook launched its Audience Network -- a way for companies to buy ads targeting interests as seen in part from your Likes, shares, ad clicks and so on inside Facebook.
The problem here isn’t that Facebook overrode prior choices, it’s that it waited so long to provide any. That may not be technically banned by Facebook’s 2012 settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, but it doesn’t look great.
What if, like Carroll, you’d opted out of the earlier kind of ads? Then Audience Network ads would only reflect your on-Facebook activity, not what you do on sites running bits of Facebook code.
Both kinds of ads are “interest-based,” in the sense that they involve an ad network trying to sense what you like and then sell ads against those perceived tastes. Advertisers don’t see you as you, just as a bundle of habits and curiosities: cooking, gardening, swearing at computers, etc.
It’s incredibly common, but Facebook is late to the game: Google launched its interest-based ads back in 2009. Like Google and Yahoo, Facebook also lets you see and correct this compilation of your perceived interests.
(Disclosure: I also write for Yahoo’s tech and finance sites, so I benefit slightly from that tracking.)
Visit facebook.com/ads/preferences while signed into your account, and you can assess how well Facebook knows you -- then decide if you care to correct it.
For a company based on sharing, Facebook was too stingy in explaining this. Its one public documentation prior to Carroll’s post seems to have been a May 26 corporate blog post that itself didn’t clarify the two ad systems at work.
As Carroll wrote in an e-mail Friday afternoon: “It's too opaque and difficult to understand.”
Rob Pegoraro is a tech writer based out of Washington, D.C. To submit a tech question, e-mail Rob at rob@robpegoraro.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/robpegoraro.