Facebook's Advertising Platform: New Attack Vectors and the Need for Interventions

Understand

Ad targeting is getting more powerful with introduction of new tools, such as Custom Audiences, behavioral targeting, and Audience Insights.

• Although this is beneficial for businesses as it enables people to receive more relevant advertising, the power of the tools has downsides.
• In this paper, we focus on three downsides: privacy violations, microtargeting (i.e., the ability to reach a specific individual or individuals without their explicit knowledge that they are the only ones an ad reaches) and ease of reaching marginalized groups.
• Using Facebook's ad system as a case study, we demonstrate the feasibility of such downsides.