Facebook knows more about you than you think
How Facebook exploits their users’ personal data for advertising purposes and the issue of privacy
Copyright [The Guardian]
Since the emergence of technology, advertising within the marketing, digital and social media sectors, has transformed in ways like never before (Lamberton & Stephen, 2016). Ever stumbled across adverts that are creepily specific and relevant to you? This is known as online behavioural advertising (OBA) whereby the platform advertising holds the power to individually target customised ads to users based on their digital preferences and interests, via tracking and monitoring their online actions (Aguirre et al., 2015). The debate concerning personal data tracking and privacy concerns has grown over the years; increasingly, tech companies have come under public pressure regarding the ethics involved in monitoring, tracking and sharing users’ sensitive data to third party companies, in exchange for personalised advertisements. This is referred to as dataveillance - the monitoring and tracking of people using technologies that generate data (Lupton, 2016).
Copyright [The New York Times on YouTube]
While the phenomena of OBA has been commended as the future of online advertising for optimising marketing profits via more relevant and systematic ads (Chen & Stallaert, 2014), the practice’s exploitation of consumers’ privacy concerns may be detrimental for social media companies’ success. In a study conducted by Ham and Nelson (2016), participants admitted that they were unaware about the functioning of targeted advertisements on Facebook including how they are delivered, increasing suspicions over the platform about data privacy. In April 2018, Facebook underwent significant public scrutiny for breaching data protection laws, failing to keeps users personal information secure (Isaak & Hanna, 2018). The company inappropriately shared approximately 87 million users’ data with Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy group, without gaining their consent (Ingram, 2018).
A follow up study about the scandal was conducted by Milansei (2018) who found that 17% of respondents had deleted the app from their devices, with 9% permanently deactivating their account. In addition, they found that 28% of respondents never trusted Facebook in the first place. Various studies came to similar conclusions, the most prominent findings being people’s increasing suspicions with Facebook’s handling of data tracking and feelings of disturbance being associated with invasion of privacy (Estrada-Jiménez et al., 2017; Rader et al., 2018). Following the scandal, restrictions around data protection have significantly tightened. The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), introduced tougher restrictions on the processing and exploitation of individual users’ personal data (Cabañas et al., 2018), due to obvious privacy risks that may be derived from malicious use of such type of information (Rama et al., 2020).
Copyright [Kaspersky]
Nevertheless, much research has found that the benefits of data sharing seem to outweigh its risks among many individuals. 65% of online buyers were unsatisfied when content deviated from their online and offline preferences and interests and therefore favoured OBA (IPG Media Lab, 2017). The personalisation of advertising is perceived in this case, as beneficial for both the receiver and marketer; the user is able to benefit from automatically being conveyed relevant content while the advertiser optimises revenue through a desirable pool of targeted people (Johnson, 2013). The OBA-privacy relationship is complex, involving various factors that influence users’ acceptance of their personal data usage, however here, it is revealed this phenomena is both positive and negative.
References
Aguirre, E., Mahr, D., Grewal, D., De Ruyter, K., & Wetzels, M. (2015). Unraveling the Personalization Paradox: The Effect of Information Collection and Trust-building Strategies on Online Advertisement Effectiveness. Journal of Retailing, 91(1), 34-49.
Cabañas, J. G., Cuevas, Á., & Cuevas, R. (2018). Facebook use of sensitive data for advertising in Europe. arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.05030.
Chen, J., & Stallaert, J. (2014). An Economic Analysis of Online Advertising Using Behavioural Targeting. Mis Quarterly, 38(2), 429-449.
Ham, C. D., & Nelson, M. R. (2016). The Role of Persuasion Knowledge, Assessment of Benefit and Harm, and Third-person Perception in Coping with Online Behavioral Advertising. Computers in Human Behavior, 62, 689-702.
Ingram, D. (2018, March 20). Factbox: Who is Cambridge Analytica and what did it do?. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-cambridge-%20analytica-factbox/factbox-who-is-cambridge-analytica-and-what-did-it-do-%20idUSKBN1GW07F
IPG Media Lab. (2017, February). Turbocharging Your Skippable PreRoll Campaign. Magna Global. https://www.magnaglobal.com/wp- content/uploads/2017/02/Magna.IPGlab_Turbocharging-Your-Skippable-Pre-Roll- Campaign_external.pdf
Isaak, J., & Hanna, M. J. (2018). User data privacy: Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, and privacy protection. Computer, 51(8), 56-59.
Johnson, J. P. (2013). Targeted Advertising and Advertising Avoidance. The RAND Journal of Economics, 44(1), 128-144.
Lamberton, C., & Stephen, A. T. (2016). A Thematic Exploration of Digital, Social Media, and Mobile Marketing: Research Evolution from 2000 to 2015 and an Agenda for Future Inquiry. Journal of Marketing, 80(6), 146-172.
Lupton, D. (2016). The Diverse Domains of Quantified Selves: Self-tracking Modes and Dataveillance. Economy and Society, 45(1), 101-122.
Milanesi, C. (2018, April 11). US Consumers Want More Transparency from Facebook. Techpinions. https://techpinions.com/us-consumers-want-more- transparency-from-facebook/52653
Rader, E., Cotter, K., & Cho, J. (2018, April). Explanations as Mechanisms for Supporting Algorithmic Transparency. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-13).
