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Facebook Targets Ads to Gay Users, Study Claims

by Amar Toor on October 22, 2010 at 12:36 PM

male silhouettesEveryone knows that Facebook, like many other sites, uses our personal information to help companies target their online advertisements to various demographic groups. Unlike other sites, though, Facebook knows a lot about us -- including, in some cases, our sexuality. And, according to a recent study, it's not afraid to share that information with third-party companies.

To test Facebook's gaydar, researchers from Microsoft and Germany's Max Planck Institute created six fake Facebook profiles; two of the mock users were straight men, two were straight women, one was a gay man, and one was a lesbian. All of the profiles were identical, save for listed sexuality. They then noted which advertisements popped up on the site for each profile and, as Gawker reports, the differences were often substantial.

While the ads for the lesbian user varied only slightly from those fed to the straight female user, the gay male profile received ads that were noticeably different from his straight counterparts. Some advertisements for gay bars were blatantly targeted to a specific audience, but most of the ads generated for the gay user didn't mention his sexuality at all -- they were just different. They still, however, posed a risk to the user's privacy. One gay-targeted ad, for example, promoted a nursing school. If the user were to click on that ad, he would inadvertently identify himself as gay, even if he'd already hidden his sexual preference from public view by adjusting his privacy settings.

And this is where the issue really gets thorny. Facebook's privacy policy clearly states that whatever information you put on your profile is fair game for advertisers to use -- even if your customized privacy settings allow only your closest friends to know that you're gay. But if someone doesn't want the rest of the Facebook public to know about his sexuality, why would he want anonymous corporations to know?

Security researcher Christopher Soghoian proposes two solutions to the dilemma. Facebook, he suggests, could either prohibit advertisers from accessing sensitive information (e.g., sexuality, political affiliation or religion), or it could automatically alert users whenever such information has been processed by a third-party advertiser.

The chances of the site adopting either approach, however, probably remain slim. We'd like to hope that Facebook would at least find some sort of compromise, if only for its youngest users, who may be reluctant to openly declare their sexuality to the rest of the world. Ultimately, that's a decision that should be made on the user's terms -- not on Facebook's.

Tags: advertising, facebook, gay, lesbian, personal information, PersonalInformation, privacy, sexual orientation, sexuality, SexualOrientation, SocialNetworking, straight, TargetedAdvertising, top, web

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