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.
"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."
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