During his Congress hearings, Mark Zuckerberg shed a little light on his plans to use artificial intelligence to combat the issue of fake news and hate speech on his platform. What he didn’t tell the world was how his company is already using AI to increase its advertising revenues.
As per some confidential documents obtained by The Intercept, Facebook has the ability to predict your behavior. While it’s a common knowledge that Zuckerberg’s advertising company–which calls itself a social networking company committed to connecting people–uses your past and current actions to serve you ads, this revelation might be surprising to many.
The documents suggest that Facebook offers the advertisers an ability to target the users based on how they would think and act in the near future. Called “FBLearner Flow,” this AI-powered tech was first developed in 2016.
The company also as a sugar-coated name for its service: Loyalty Prediction. As a part of this service, the advertiser gets the power to bombard your feed with advertisements and change your natural course of action.
This might sound like a sophisticated way to target users but think about its possible effects. With the vast trough of data of 2 billion users, Facebook can efficiently train its AI and make this prediction model even smarter. This would further strengthen advertisers to manipulate your buying habits and misguide your natural instincts.
The specifics of collected data and its exact extent currently remains hidden from public knowledge.
It’s worth noting Facebook mentions that all the data is anonymized and aggregated. However, they’re using this data to gain useful insights and use the same to earn billions of dollars.
This revelation is undoubtedly going to spark some ethicality questions. You can read the complete report here for detailed insight.
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