{"id":77785,"date":"2018-04-13T16:02:55","date_gmt":"2018-04-13T23:02:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/04\/does-facebook-use-ai-to-predict-your-future-actions-for-advertisers"},"modified":"2018-04-13T16:02:55","modified_gmt":"2018-04-13T23:02:55","slug":"does-facebook-use-ai-to-predict-your-future-actions-for-advertisers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/04\/does-facebook-use-ai-to-predict-your-future-actions-for-advertisers","title":{"rendered":"Does Facebook Use AI To Predict Your Future Actions For Advertisers?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal erupted in March, Facebook has been attempting to make a moral stand for your privacy, distancing itself from the unscrupulous practices of the U.K. political consultancy. \u201cProtecting people\u2019s information is at the heart of everything we do,\u201d wrote Paul Grewal, Facebook\u2019s deputy general counsel, just a few weeks before founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg hit Capitol Hill to make similar reassurances, telling lawmakers, \u201cAcross the board, we have a responsibility to not just build tools, but to make sure those tools are used for good.\u201d But in reality, a confidential Facebook document reviewed by The Intercept shows that the two companies are far more similar than the social network would like you to believe.<\/p>\n

The recent document, described as \u201cconfidential,\u201d outlines a new advertising service that expands how the social network sells corporations\u2019 access to its users and their lives: Instead of merely offering advertisers the ability to target people based on demographics and consumer preferences, Facebook instead offers the ability to target them based on how they will <\/em>behave, what they will<\/em> buy, and what they will <\/em>think. These capabilities are the fruits of a self-improving, artificial intelligence-powered prediction engine, first unveiled by Facebook in 2016 and dubbed \u201cFBLearner Flow.\u201d<\/p>\n

One slide in the document touts Facebook\u2019s ability to \u201cpredict future behavior,\u201d allowing companies to target people on the basis of decisions they haven\u2019t even made yet. This would, potentially, give third parties the opportunity to alter a consumer\u2019s anticipated course. Here, Facebook explains how it can comb through its entire user base of over 2 billion individuals and produce millions of people who are \u201cat risk\u201d of jumping ship from one brand to a competitor. These individuals could then be targeted aggressively with advertising that could pre-empt and change their decision entirely \u2014 something Facebook calls \u201cimproved marketing efficiency.\u201d This isn\u2019t Facebook showing you Chevy ads because you\u2019ve been reading about Ford all week \u2014 old hat in the online marketing world \u2014 rather Facebook using facts of your life to predict that in the near future, you\u2019re going to get sick of your car. Facebook\u2019s name for this service: \u201cloyalty prediction.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal erupted in March, Facebook has been attempting to make a moral stand for your privacy, distancing itself from the unscrupulous practices of the U.K. political consultancy. \u201cProtecting people\u2019s information is at the heart of everything we do,\u201d wrote Paul Grewal, Facebook\u2019s deputy general counsel, just a few weeks before founder [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,6,1491],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics","category-robotics-ai","category-transportation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77785\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}