In an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, 44 advocacy groups urged the
Facebook founder to scrap the data gathering, saying that it was being used to enable “surveillance
advertising” for young users.
The researchers found: “Facebook can collect data from other browser tabs and pages that children
open, and harvest information like which buttons they click on, which terms they search or products they
purchase or put in their basket. There is no reason to store this sort of conversion data,
except to fuel the ad delivery system.”
Joe Osborne, a Meta spokesperson, said: “It’s wrong to say that because we show data in our
transparency tools it’s automatically used for ads. We don’t use data from our advertisers’ and partners’
websites and apps to personalize ads to people under 18.
“The reason this information shows up in our transparency tools is because teens visit sites or apps that
use our business tools. We want to provide transparency into the data we receive, even if it’s not used
for ads personalization.”
Questions:
1. How will you evaluate the current practices of personalized advertising on social media? What are
the effects of personalized ads to teenage users that you can think of?
