It would be nice if everyone could see more privacy protection.
Online advertising offers marketers the chance to aim ads at very specific groups of people — say, golf players in Illinois who make more than $150,000 a year and vacation in Hawaii.
But two recent academic papers show some potential pitfalls of such precise tailoring.
Both papers focus on Facebook ads and show that in certain circumstances, advertisers — or snoops posing as advertisers — may be able to learn sensitive profile information, like a person’s sexual orientation or religion, even if the person is sharing that information only with a small circle of friends. Facebook does not share such information with advertisers.
The papers come amid an intense focus on vulnerabilities in Facebook’s privacy safeguards.
