by On the afternoon of this Wednesday, February 15, Meta announced news related to the ‘Why am I seeing this ad?’ from Facebook, which will feature more detailed explanations of how the company uses artificial intelligence (AI) to display personalized ads.
In that sensethe social network offers advertising to users depending on the type of activity they register and based on their interests and categories. To do this, it analyzes the Facebook pages that users have ‘liked’, the content posted or the ads that have been clicked on.
In addition, Meta has a section in which it details how it decides the ads it shows to its usersavailable in its Help Service, where it also offers tools to control the ads that are seen on this social network.
However, with the aim of going “one step further” in its transparency policy, Meta announced that it has begun to include information about how machine learning models are used to show ads to members of your community.
Machine learning models can now be consulted (‘machine learning’) that the company uses to “select and deliver the ads” on its platform, with examples showing how this technology connects various themes to display advertising.
It will also add more ways to find advertising controls. This will make ‘Ad Preferences’ accessible on additional pages of the ‘Why am I seeing this ad?’ tool.
“By increasing our transparency about how our machine learning models work for serving ads, our goal is to help people feel more secure and increase our responsibility”, indicated Meta, who added and pointed out that These changes are due to the opinions received by the users of the social network.
Finally, the company commented that will continue to improve its transparency offering and will continue to look for “new ways to give people a better understanding of how we use data and the technology to show them ads.”
The updated version of ‘Why am I seeing this ad?’ It will initially arrive on Facebook globally, with expansion to Instagram expected “in the future.”
Meta paid for years to extract data from websites
Meta, the company that owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, paid data collection company Bright Data for several years in exchange for its web scraping services, while publicly condemning the practice and suing others companies that extracted data from their own platforms and social networks.
Web scraping is a technique that uses software programs to extract information from websites, usually by simulating human browsing on the Internet. This activity may or may not be authorized and may pose a risk to the privacy of users when personal information is collected.
The company led by Mark Zuckerberg has denounced this activity and implemented measures to combat scraping, as explained in a statement on its website. In fact, it qualifies the automation to obtain data without permission as a violation of its terms.
In the month of January this year, Meta continued to address web scraping and announced that it was taking legal action in the United States to ban the company Voyager Labs from Facebook and Instagram because they were “creating fake accounts and collecting user data.”
Thus, according to legal documents to which Bloomberg had access, Meta had contracts “for years” with the Bright Data company, which offered services such as scraping profile information. He also obtained information on likes, followers, posts, and comments from social media platforms TikTok and Twitter, and from e-commerce sites such as Amazon, eBay, and Walmart.
These documents belong to a lawsuit that Meta filed against the Bright Data company itself for collecting information from Facebook and Instagram and subsequently selling it. Thus, through email correspondence from both companies, it was possible to confirm that Meta also contracted their services, according to Bloomberg.
For his part, Meta spokesman Andy Stone confirmed in an interview with Bloomberg that the social media giant had indeed paid Bright Data, but only to “extract data from e-commerce sites.” However, he offered no information on which sites he chose to extract the information.
*With information from Europa Press
