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It’s Like AdSense for Your Soul

Machine intelligence meets the sad truth. Facebook serves up some disturbingly insightful advertising.

Written by Nick Senske on August 18, 2008

I was doing some work this afternoon and procrastinated with some Facebook maintenance which involved reloading the site several times over the span of a few minutes in order to view my profile changes.

Imagine my utter shock when this ad was served up and would not leave my newsfeed:

Easily Distracted? Facebook Ad.
Of course, when I saw this, I immediately made a blog post. Apparently, I am easily distracted.

Facebook, like AdSense and many other websites, uses contextual elements (favorite TV shows in your profile, for example) to serve up targeted advertising.

The ad in question is most likely just an unfortunate coincidence, but for a moment I thought I had been observed, morally judged for my behavior, and then given a sales pitch.

(In other words, I probably had a glimpse of the future.)

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Nick — Aug 18, 2008
 
Tagged with: AdSense, Advertising, Artificial Intelligence, Facebook, Procrastination, Surveillance, The Future

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