Investigating Ad Transparency Mechanisms in Social Media: A Case Study of Facebook's Explanations

Abstract

Targeted advertising has been subject to many privacy complaints from both users and policy makers. Despite this attention, users still have little understanding of what data the advertising platforms have about them and why they are shown particular ads. To address such concerns, Facebook recently introduced two transparency mechanisms: a "Why am I seeing this?" button that provides users with an explanation of why they were shown a particular ad (ad explanations), and an Ad Preferences Page that provides users with a list of attributes Facebook has inferred about them and how (data explanations).

Oh, the Places You've Been! User Reactions to Longitudinal Transparency About Third-Party Web Tracking and Inferencing

“…For example, Google's Ad Settings (Figure 1b) lists some estimated interests and gives vague explanations of how they were chosen. These dashboards have been shown to be incomplete [89,99], misleading [4], and potentially inaccurate [9,21]. They have also been used to show discrimination in advertising [20] and targeting on sensitive topics [48,99].…”

“…Users have limited means to learn about the extent and implications of third-party tracking and personalization. Advertising networks provide general explanations of ad targeting, and some companies show interests that have been inferred (Figures 1a, 1b), though they have been shown to provide incomplete and possibly misleading information [4,89,99]. Userinstalled browser extensions (Figures 1c, 1d) highlight the trackers on the web pages a user visits, but provide limited insight into longitudinal tracking and do not explain what companies have learned and inferred about users' interests over the long term [80].…”

Quantity vs. Quality: Evaluating User Interest Profiles Using Ad Preference Managers

“…15 Figure 8 shows a CDF of the fraction of interests that participants judged to be relevant. The lines capture different thresholds for relevance: one considers interests in the range [4,5] as relevant, while the other includes interests in the range [3,5]. In the more permissive case, 52-56% of participants said less than half of their interests were relevant; in the stricter case, 86-91% of participants said the same thing.…”

Lack of the normative lens: Discussions on research on micro‐targeted ads explanation of Facebook

“…Research has endeavored to shed more light into the current operational details of the Facebook's micro-targeted ads. For example, Andreou et al (2018) identified properties that can be used to understand the explanations, and specifically proposed two sets of measures that can be used to describe how advertisers target users ("ad explanations") and how Facebook infers data about users ("data explanations"). Other studies have turned to the users as a source of insights by seeking user input on micro-targeted ads explanations (Eslami, Krishna Kumaran, Sandvig, & Karahalios, 2018;Plane, Redmiles, Mazurek, & Tschantz, 2017;Ur et al, 2012).…”