[HN Gopher] 'Nanotargeting' Facebook users based on their percei...
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'Nanotargeting' Facebook users based on their perceived interests
Author : Hard_Space
Score : 93 points
Date : 2021-10-14 11:41 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.unite.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.unite.ai)
| taneq wrote:
| 'Nanotargeting' is an exciting new word for 'stalking'.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I'm waiting for the exciting new movie starring Jake
| Gyllenhaal, The Night Nanotargeter.
| ssivark wrote:
| ...or "gaslighting".
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| Yet another reason to never use Facebook!
|
| Using Facebook has been an IQ test - you are below 100 if you use
| it!
| EarthLaunch wrote:
| Facebook is under attack because it's not yet giving all info to
| the people smearing it.
|
| After these stories stop, you will know Facebook owns you.
| [deleted]
| throwawayfear wrote:
| It's under attack because tyrants masquerading as bureacrats
| and politicians want to know everything about everyone so they
| can control everyone. Facebook has a lot of this data and uses
| it for advertising products and services and adding new
| features, and sometimes their algorithms can get out of hand
| the same way cliques on Reddit or Twitter get out of hand when
| people get brainwashed by doom-scrolling and clickbait.
|
| It's about power and control. These politicians don't actually
| care about people beyond that, or even about what Facebook is
| really up to. It's a smear campaign to destroy a legitimate
| platform that unites people and connects people, because that
| is contra to what the powers that be want. They don't want that
| unity. They want fragmentation and isolation in society so
| everything can decline while they rise in power.
| m3at wrote:
| As commenters have noted this has been done before. Likely, the
| reason why this can't be "fixed" is that it's a result of the
| curse of dimensionality [1] in the statistical sense: more
| dimensions make it exponentially easier to separate the space.
|
| This quote from the research suggest it as well, the error rate
| keep being divided by two while adding dimension (=interests)
| linearly:
|
| > the formula estimated that '12, 18, 22, and 27 random interests
| make a user unique on FB with a probability of 50%, 80%, 90%, and
| 95%, respectively'.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_dimensionality
| cortesoft wrote:
| I would be pretty easy to set a lower limit on the number of
| people targeted by an ad. If the target audience is smaller
| than, say, 500 people, don't let that target be chosen.
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| Beware of nanozuks!!! Seriously, what is so malicious about
| delivering ads based on your personal preferences? Do I need to
| be targeted by ads that the rest of my demographic prefers?
| reilly3000 wrote:
| There are so many ways to abuse micro-targeting. Say
| hypothetically you're a private investigator and you have a
| target that you want to get into their email. You could look at
| their Facebook page to find their favorite band, food, and
| travel destination. With that info plus their zip code you
| could make ads that will just target them personally. Offer
| free tickets to their favorite band on a landing page with
| registration, then store their commonly reused password in
| plain text-done.
|
| This type of 'nano-targeting' was the strategy that Cambridge
| Analytica used to discourage millions of Hillary Clinton
| supporters from voting. Its been used for countless forms of
| abuse, manipulation, and data gathering, where even impression
| counts can be revealing, no clicks needed.
| vadfa wrote:
| Discouraging someone from voting is now "abuse"?
| kesselvon wrote:
| It's pretty bad to run campaigns that discourage voting.
| Accepted practice is to encourage to vote for someone, and
| not discouraging participation completely.
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| Tragic role of Russian nanozucks in 2016 presidential
| election cannot be overstated. When did we start believing
| that handing out millions of flyers is the same thing as
| selling millions of cars?
| joshvm wrote:
| This has been possible for a while, people have even done it as a
| prank:
|
| https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking...
|
| The loophole to get round minimum audiences is easy - you use the
| target email address and add eg 99 people of the opposite gender.
| Then you set the audience ad to the target's gender. Though in
| principle Facebook should be able to check the effective reach of
| the ad and stop that.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Such a good prank.
|
| Imagine a future where one employee is assigned per person to
| interview and understand exactly what you need. They could just
| order things before you ask!
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Not hard to imagine with advances in machine learning. I'd
| guess you will almost certainly have at least the equivalent
| cognitive power of one person monitoring your purchasing
| needs within the next 20 years.
| legitster wrote:
| One of my favorite tech pranks.
|
| Although it should be noted that Facebook has long since
| changed their the way they handle targeting and it's no longer
| possible to use this method.
| kjrose wrote:
| I thought Facebook made some changes to prevent this after the
| last time someone demonstrated how easy it was... I guess those
| changes didn't work.
|
| Makes sense considering how you can pretty much uniquely identify
| anyone with a zip code, gender and age.
| m_ke wrote:
| Can't wait for Facebook to start tracking what we do 24/7 in the
| physical world.
| https://mobile.twitter.com/ylecun/status/1448625453586071557
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| google and apple already do
| m_ke wrote:
| Yeah but now they'll be able to see everything you come
| across at 60fps
| [deleted]
| helen___keller wrote:
| > The research also suggests that 'nanotargeting' users in this
| way is not only cheap, but occasionally free, since Facebook
| often will not charge an advertiser for an underserved campaign
| (i.e. a campaign that only reached one person).
|
| Not free for long, I imagine, now that this is published
| Damogran6 wrote:
| Probably not. I guarantee one or several really smart people
| looking at the targeting problem would have considered it
| during the initial research effort. "I'm going to target X
| people with this, what are the cost models when X=1, 100, 1K,
| 1M targets?"
| vadfa wrote:
| This has been known for a very long time, I remember reading
| about people doing stuff like this to piss others off a loooong
| time ago
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| the ones I read were people getting their dream jobs because
| they were smart enough to target an ad about how smart they
| were and deserved the job to the person doing the hiring.
| legitster wrote:
| > The paper's authors point out a number of cases where
| nanotargeting was used in a deceptive manner, including the time
| in 2017 that UK Labour politician Jeremy Corbyn, then leader of
| the government's opposition party, decreed that Labour should run
| a Facebook ad campaign to encourage voter registration.
|
| > Labour party chiefs disapproved the idea, but rather than
| entering into conflict, simply implemented a PS5000 ad campaign
| designed to only target Corbyn and his associates, as well as a
| select number of sympathetic journalists. No-one else saw those
| ads.
|
| I'm not going to lie, that's a pretty impressive way to get
| someone off of your back.
| IshKebab wrote:
| So say I wanted to target Bill Gates, how do I magically know
| what combination of interests will select him?
| z_zetetic_z wrote:
| "In 2018 an AdNews study established that on average, Facebook
| algorithmically assigns 357 interests per user, out of which 134
| were rated as 'accurate'."
|
| Ha ha ha! Ha ha, ha ha ha! Ha ha! What a joke!
| kjrose wrote:
| So < 50% wow.
| lobocinza wrote:
| And I imagine variability to be huge in this case. Also average
| may not 'mean' much as fat tails may cause it to look
| better/worse that what it actually is.
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(page generated 2021-10-14 23:02 UTC)