Proper waste disposal is a key to protecting public health. Thus poorly managed and disposed waste encourages breeding of insect vectors and exposed public to increase risk of infection. This study aimed at determining the residents' perception about waste disposal in Sokoto metropolis. This was a descriptive cross-sectional survey conducted in Sokoto metropolis. A two stage sampling technique was used to select the survey participants. A set of interviewer-administered questionnaires were used to collect field data. Ethical clearance was obtained from state research ethics committee and in addition, individual informed consent was obtained before questionnaires were administered. Average age of the respondents was 30 years with 50% aged between 25 and 44 years. Large proportion (47.4%) of the respondents had only Quranic education. Majority (94.1%) of the respondents expressed worries about the indiscriminate littering of the metropolis with waste and more than half (55%) reported that residents were responsible for the state of poor sanitation while 38% felt it was fault of government. Although, 91% of respondents said it is appropriate for residents to clean own surroundings, 41% felt residents alone should take sole responsibility for the cleaning; while 40% felt government and residents should take joint responsibility. Less than half (46%) of respondents reported that improper waste disposal have health related problems. Although, majority respondents were disturbed with the way refuse litters the state metropolis, many are unaware of its health related problems. There is need to create awareness among general public of consequences of poor refuse disposal.

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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, lead 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.