Facebook is making a big change to their advertising system. They’re giving users more control over what ads are presented by the service and they’re also gonna harvest more user data to serve those ads. The service is going to allow users to say which ads they like and which ads they don’t. There’s basically going to be a little tab on the side of the ads that you can click on, and a drop down menu will tell you why you’re seeing it and how you can remove it. So you can click the specific tabs and edit your profile accordingly. If you don’t want to see specific things, you can remove them or can you add things that you do like. You can also see what information Facebook is using to dictate what kind of ads show up on your profile.
The other change is that the service will allow advertisers access to a lot more data. For instance, browsing history is going to be available as part of the database that advertisers target. This is not necessarily a game changer, but it’s something that Facebook or any other social media website has never done before. Right now people are kind of blissfully unaware of how advertising and tracking works. Facebook appears to be doing the right thing by allowing users to modify their advertising profiles. However, this might backfire on the company if they’re going to bring too much attention to something. This could sort of rock the boat and make users wonder if they should really be tracked.
But on the other hand, people can always find ways to get around the system and not adhere to the protocols of Facebook if they really wanted to. Then there’s always the option of not being on Facebook at all, which is something that more and more people seem to be doing as of late.