Marketplace®

Daily business news and economic stories

Facebook outs gays to advertisers

It's another day and another privacy problem at Facebook. This time the social network appears to be outing gay and lesbian users to advertisers.

Download

For years, Facebook has allowed advertisers to target ads based on a user’s zip-code, age or gender and apparently also their sexuality. A team of researchers at Microsoft and Germany’s Max Planck Institute found a substantial number of ads on Facebook that were targeted specifically at gay men. When users click on those ads the website that placed them instantly knows that the user is gay. And according to the study authors, the ads targeting gay men were diverse. One was for a nursing school in Florida.

We hear from Chris Soghoin, a privacy researcher at Indiana University, and Jason Kaufman, a research fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Related Topics

Tagged as:

Latest Episodes

View All Shows
  • Marketplace
    24 minutes ago
    25:36
  • Marketplace Morning Report
    8 hours ago
    7:41
  • Marketplace Tech
    13 hours ago
    5:00
  • Make Me Smart
    a day ago
    17:42
  • This Is Uncomfortable
    9 days ago
    56:05
  • Million Bazillion
    a month ago
    32:45