Facebook Using Your Likes, Browsing History & Mood Manipulation
When you read the recent blog post from Facebook about how they’re going to “Make Ads Better” and “Give People More Control”, you really want to believe them. You want to believe that they’re really just trying to make your life easier by providing ads relevant to your “likes” and apps you choose to install. Sure, if I have the MLB app, why wouldn’t I want to know about a sale on caps for my favorite ball team? Or if I’m an exercise nut, getting the latest gear for my next triathlon might be really important to me and save me the time of searching for it.
But the bottom line is this: Facebook is going back on something they promised years ago. Not only are they using our likes and apps to market to us, they’re also using our browsing history to target ads. They can “only” use information from sites that have Facebook buttons (to like, recommend or share) or that you can login to with your Facebook account, but these days, that’s practically any site!
