Ghost Influence is a personal site about marketing experiments, including pranking a roommate with targeted Facebook ads.
HN links it mainly for the roommate Facebook ad prank, cited in discussions of how precisely ads can target individuals.
At least at one point, you could. See the example of the person who pranked his roommate through very specifically targeted facebook ads. [1]
It's even mentioned in that article how to get around the fix they put in so you couldn't target a group of less than 20 people.
I'm not sure if this particular method still works, but let's take a step back and think before we make claims about what is and is not possible in a complex system with lots features and knobs to twiddle. Whether this was an emergent feature from other features of the system or a specifically desired and designed behavior, at least at one point Facebook allowed very fine grained targeting.
1: http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roommate-with-targeted-facebook-ads/
There was a blog post a few years ago where a guy to get back at a prank from his room mate used target facebook ads to hit just him to make him feel crazy[0]. Also facebook has openly hijacked every political system on the planet, made that Fyre festival happen, and have been spewing data at near anonymous developer accounts for a decade. I think maybe this is a good thing that this company is being open about it. If this was illegal then all the "legit" people that have been abusing it would have something to worry about and many of them are very rich. I'm not sure the company using the services offered in the way they are designed is the real villain.
[0] https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roommate-with-targeted-facebook-ads/
They don't want to ban targeted ads based on political views? Is this because the politicians don't want to ban the techniques that they use to get reelected?
And do they want to ban ads targeted by "customer lists". Both Google Facebook allow advertizers to upload email or FB-ID lists, and will target an ad to show it only to people on the list. This (http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roommate-with-targeted-facebook-ads/) feels a lot more spooky to me than advertizing target to wide categories like health - I don't want or need to see products that are are for menopausal women, impotent men, or deaf old people since I'm not in any of these category.
This has been possible for a while, people have even done it as a prank:
https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roommate-with-targeted-facebook-ads/
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.
That’s so messed up. What do you think of advertisements for drugs in general? Have they been helpful finding treatment for your condition ? They are illegal where i’m from i believe (i’ve never seen one myself except in the us).
Btw, this reminds of this absolutely hilarious story i think i first heard of here on HN: https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roommate-with-targeted-facebook-ads/
Ads where you target a small number of people are of course cheap, making pranks like [1] possible for next to no cost. The interesting thing is can you cheaply run campaigns on influential people such a CEOs and politicians. I think you probably could!
[1] https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roommate-with-targeted-facebook-ads/