Facebook’s Illusion of Control over Location-Related Ad Targeting

Facebook’s advertising principles and statements from the VP of ads, Rob Goldman, emphasize that its Ads Preferences tool allows users to “control how your data informs your ad experience.” However, Irfan Faizullabhoy and I have observed that when it comes to one of the most privacy-sensitive types of data, location, Facebook does not provide meaningful controls and is misleading in its statements to users and advertisers. Moreover, Facebook gives advertisers tools to run ad campaigns targeting people “who live in” or “were recently in” a geographic area as small as a single house. Taken together, Facebook creates an illusion of control rather than gives actual control over location-related ad targeting, which can lead to real harms.

Few Location Controls are Available

The Ads Preferences page does not contain any location controls, except for a sub-section in interests titled Travel, places and events, which is not clearly connected to any specific location history. For me, the section contained a combination of cities and countries I’ve never been to: Kuala Lumpur, Buenos Aires, Argentina, Uruguay, and other eclectic things: Holiday, Tourism, Booking.com, Sampling (music). This lack of specificity and relation to where I’ve been made it clear it is not a location control. So I dug deeper, and clicked on the link at the bottom, How Facebook ads work. Here Facebook says “We use location data to show you ads from advertisers trying to reach people in…