Pranking My Roommate With Eerily Targeted Facebook Ads
It’s been proven time and time again that Facebook knows more about you than you know about you. While advertisers are able to use that data in their targeting, it’s often poorly executed (which is why I, a Jew-ish guy, often see ads for Christian dating sites), but as a Facebook user you’re never able to see WHY you’re being targeted. This was exactly what I planned to use to exact my revenge. I was going to target him with highly personalized messages that were focused on things Facebook truly shouldn’t know about his personal life – things that weren’t even online, let alone on Facebook. The goal, to make him unbelievably paranoid.
Since I didn’t want him to know that I was placing the ads I opted to use sidebar ads and direct him to sites that somewhat related to the message – although most of the links associated were pretty random. This enabled me to target him with ads anonymously whereas if I had done newsfeed ads I would have needed to create and populate a fake Facebook page to maintain the illusion (let’s be honest, I may not do things half-assed, but I still do them efficiently).
