Analyzing the Impact and Accuracy of Facebook Activity on Facebook's Ad-Interest Inference Process

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Social media platforms like Facebook have become increasingly popular for serving targeted ads to their users. This has led to increased privacy concerns due to the lack of transparency regarding how ads are matched against each user profile. Facebook infers user interests through their activities and targets ads based on those interests. Although Facebook provides explanations for why a particular interest is inferred about a user, there is still a gap in understanding what activities lead to interest inferences and the extent to which the sentiment or context of activities is considered in inferring interests. To obtain insights into how Facebook generates interests from a user’s Facebook activities, we performed controlled experiments by creating new accounts and systematically executing numerous planned activities. This enabled us to make causal inferences about activities that lead to generating specific interests, many of which were not representative of actual user preferences. We also evaluated which activities resulted in interests and found that very naive activities, such as only viewing/scrolling through a page, leads to an interest inference. We found 33.22% of the inferred interests were inaccurate or irrelevant. We further evaluated the interest inference explanations provided by Facebook and found that these explanations were too generalized and, at times, misleading. To understand if our findings hold for a large and diverse sample, we conducted a user study where we recruited 146 participants (through Amazon Mechanical Turk) from different regions of the world to evaluate the accuracy of interests inferred by Facebook. We developed a browser extension to extract data from their own Facebook accounts and ask questions based on such data. Our participants reported a similar range (29%) of inaccuracy as observed in our controlled experiments. We also found that most of our participants were unaware of the availability of Facebook’s ad preference manager, interest inference process, and even interest explanations.