Meta is promising to give people deeper insight into how their activity on and off Facebook factors into the ads it serves up on their feeds.
Essentially, the Facebook “Why am I seeing this ad?” tool will give you an explanation more detailed than the equivalent of “the advertiser wanted to reach grown-up warm bodies in the US," according to Pedro Pavón, Global Director of Ads and Monetization Privacy.
When this rolls out on your account, you’ll click or tap the ellipsis-icon menu button at the top right of an ad in your feed and select the familiar “Why am I seeing this ad?" option. Here, you’ll see two new options: “Advertiser choices” and “Your activity.”
The former should cover what you see today, which often show a striking lack of precision. In my account, advertisers from United Airlines to the Van Gogh Expo reported in this dialog that they’d targeted people who “Set their age to 18 and older” with “A primary location in the United States.”
The latter, however, will reveal how your digital footsteps might have attracted an advertiser’s interest based on “Your activity on Meta technologies” and “Your activity off Meta technologies.”
In the first category, one screenshot shows that an ad for bath bombs came from the user interacting with Facebook ads about “personal care, nutrition and retail,” pages about “hair care and crafting,” and “products related to apparel in an ad or on Facebook Marketplace”—as well as a friend who engaged “with a related page.”
In the second, another screenshot says the user “visited websites about personal care,” “used apps about lifestyle,” and “interacted with products related to apparel on a website or app.”
Note that you can already set Facebook to stop that off-premises tracking by disabling “Off-Facebook Activity” recording and clearing its history, courtesy of privacy options Facebook finished rolling out in January 2020. Mozilla Firefox and Apple’s Safari also block this web tracking by default, while Apple’s “App Tracking Transparency” feature in iOS and iPadOS requires Meta and other apps to get your permission before peeking at your use of other apps.
Meta says these new Facebook features (coming to Instagram later), as well as more visibility for the Ads Preferences tool that lets you inspect and edit the ad topics that Meta thinks have your interest, should make its ads less mysterious.
“Being transparent about how we use machine learning is essential because it ensures that people are aware that this technology is a part of our ads system and that they know the types of information it is using,” Pavón says.
Unstated: Facebook must be so tired of people thinking its apps listen secretly to their users—a level of creepy, clandestine surveillance that the company has denied for years, would be flagged by privacy tools in iOS and Android, and would have tech-skeptical regulators clamoring to dismember the company.
Pavón doesn’t give a timeline for the deployment of these features, only that they're “rolling out globally”; Facebook being Facebook, we can’t rule out rollout glitches getting in the way.
For example, the suggestion-free, chronologically ranked “Feeds” tab that Facebook announced last July may remain invisible for most users because the support note explaining how to pin that new tab to Facebook’s home screen came with incorrect advice.
Facebook publicist Mari Melguizo quickly acknowledged the error after I emailed the company’s PR department Wednesday morning and provided correct details: Tap the menu icon in Facebook’s Android or iOS app, select Settings & privacy > Settings > Profile settings and then scroll all the way down to Shortcut Bar. But an hour after pinning the Feeds tab that way, it’s yet to show up in Facebook’s home screen on any of my devices.