Is Facebook Ad Data Outing Gay Users?

Just let me ask you this question:
Have you heard the story of a man who ended his life after he was outed online as a gay man? Tyler Clementi, as it was reported by Yahoo, posted his last words on Facebook before taking his own life: "Jumping off the gw bridge sorry".

Well this happened a little while ago and I believe that the news is all over Facebook. And to mention Facebook, I wonder if you know the effect of a single click that you make on a Facebook ad. Let me tell you that this is also news!

The ads on Facebook happen to be, not only well displayed, but also well targeted. According to Christopher Soghian, Internet security blogger:
"Simply by clicking on the advertisements, a user could be revealing a bit of highly sensitive personal information to an advertiser, simply due to the fact that the advertiser has only targeted a particular group (gender, sexuality,religion) for that advertisement. Thus the moment you arrive at the advertiser's website, they now know that the IP address and cookie value they have assigned to you is associated with someone that is gay, muslim, or republican..."

But that is not all. To contribute on the issue, Jacqui Cheng writes:
" If the advertiser in question also collects other data such as Facebook ID, then the information can be tied together without any thought, even if the user has not made the information public" "The collection of such information (especially when tied to something as sensitive as sexual orientation) could spell out disaster for a user who thinks he/she is being fastidious when keeping his/her profile private."

The sad part of this news is that Facebook did not immediately respond to The Upshot's request for comments.

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"The researchers set up Facebook profiles for straight men, straight women, a gay woman, and a gay man to monitor the type of ads that appeared on the site when each user was logged in to their profile. They found that the ads for the gay and lesbian users were different - though not balantly so to the user - form the ads that appeared for the straight users."

Yahoo News

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3 Characteristics Of Information That Online Publishers And Marketers Should Pay Attention To - Reach

Previously... parent post.

1. Reach.

This refers to two things. These are:

One,Reach refers to the potential number of readers a publisher can interact with - for publishers, or the potential number of customers a business can interact with - for Marketers. The common word is traffic. Generating this traffic is one of the greatest challenges online publishers, advertisers and marketers face. The strategies involved include:

• Search engine optimization.
• RSS aggregators and directories.
• Social bookmarking sites.
• Pinging services.
• Groups and forums, etc.

Two, Reach also refers to the diversity of the contents publishers can provide, or the number of different categories and products a consumer interface, i.e. store, catalog, website, can cover. For instance, diverse content can be experience in Wikipedia, while a wide range of products can be found in Amazon.

2. Richness.
3. Affiliation.

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"Have you ever seen a web page and wondered: "Hey! How did they do that?" To find out, click the VIEW option in your browser's toolbar and select SOURCE or PAGE SOURCE. This will open a window that shows you the HTML code of the page."

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3 Characteristics Of Information That Online Publishers And Marketers Should Pay Attention To

Information. It is simply knowledge or facts. But Wikipedia has something a little more interesting going on about the definition. This is:

"Information, in its most restricted technical sense, is an ordered sequence of symbols. As a concept, however, information has many meanings.^[1] Moreover, the concept of information is closely related to notions of constraint, communication, control, data, form, instruction, knowledge, meaning, mental stimulus, pattern, perception, and representation."

Nevertheless, it is a fact that this era is not accidentally called the 'Information age'. It is an era that Information is sovereign. Wealth. Leadership. The secrete key to the doors of the unlocked hidden treasures. Ironically, this same Information is free.

Free distribution and sharing of Information, online, is very much evident. This is also true about the promotion of the same. For instance, The W3C's vision is One Web. One of the consortium's primary goals is to make the benefits of the web available to all people, irrespective of their hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, physical or mental ability.

The commercial internet does not tail behind, too, in the promotion of Information. This is evident where Marketers use the 'free newsletters' strategy to market. And, this is just but to mention a few.

Most importantly, Evans and Wurster of Harvard once had an interesting argument.
The two masters of Harvard argued that:

"There are 3 characteristics of Information which, when combined with Disruptive Internet Technologies, can have a major impact on the market place."

These include:

1. Reach.
2. Richness.
3. Affiliation.

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"Disruptive Internet Technologies - Internet-based communication approach which changes the way in which information about products is exchanged, which impacts the basis for competition in a market place."

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