The main concerns are not the ads themselves, but the uncontrolled amounts of information that are being collected to tailor those ads (and that can potentially be then used for far more evil purposes), the emerging tendency to try to get users addicted to content so they can see more ads (with unintended consequences like radicalization of news because extreme content receives more visits ), and the question of how effective a manipulation technique has to be before it crosses the line between marketing and control of masses.
The ads themselves are a concern too. Especially when they are annoying, malware delivery vehicles, disguised as content and so inefficient that 90% of the memory and cpu cycles of a browser are consumed by rendering the ads instead of content.
The user tracking for targeting ads is a big issue, but not the only one.
> Actually, this is generally an advantage of FB... Their ads are tight on this front.
The qualifier ‘generally’ is important here, which I understand to mean “usually, but not always”.
Facebook Allowed Political Ads That Were Actually Scams and Malware
“Some people who clicked on a Facebook ad found their computers frozen.”
“Their screens displayed a warning and a computer-generated voice informed them that their machine had been “infected with viruses, spywares and pornwares.””
“Many of the scams had also been flagged by users, fact-checking groups and cybersecurity services — even the Federal Trade Commission — long before they appeared on the social network.”
When people cross the street, they are generally not hit by buses. Yet, it would be incorrect to claim there’s no danger from buses when crossing the road. And to frontrun the comments saying Facebook’s crosswalks may have fewer bus incidents (and possibly overextend the metaphor): no one gets hit by a bus when taking the footpath over the road instead.
> but the uncontrolled amounts of information that are being collected to tailor those ads
^ Especially this. (side note: funny thing how so much of this information is gathered, yet targeting is still so bad)
> the emerging tendency to try to get users addicted to content so they can see more ads
Also very important. These platforms don't build features with "how to make things better for users" in mind, they do so with "how do we increase user engagement for ad spend" (see Snapchat as a prime example)
The targeting only looks bad because you don't know how valuable a lead is in the relevant business. If you're a tenth as likely to click on something with ten times the customer acquisition cost, then from the platform's perspective these are equally profitable to show.
Case in point: do some searches on mattresses and see what ads you see over the next weeks. Huge value per customer, so if you can plausibly be lumped into mattress firms' targeting options they'll win the auction.
> do some searches on mattresses and see what ads you see over the next weeks.
This sounds like an interesting experiment. I mean, the result seems obvious for a search on mattresses, but I think we can expand on this to search for more controversial or political topics. I'm going to start planning this experiment and I'd be very interested if anyone knows of an existing study along the same lines.
