FB aims to help users understand ad-targeting

San Francisco, July 12 (IANS) Facebook has introduced new steps to let people know and adjust how their information influences the ads they see which would help them to understand more about ad-targeting on its platform.

"We heard feedback from people that they can still be hard to understand. Today we're making two additional changes to address those concerns.

"We'll show people more reasons why they're seeing an ad on Facebook and we're also updating Ad Preferences to show you more about businesses that upload lists with your information, such as an email address or phone number," Sreethu Thulasi, Product Manager, Facebook wrote in a blog post on Thursday.

To provide greater transparency and control, the social networking giant would allow users to see more detailed targeting, including the interests or categories that matched them with a specific ad.

Along with highlighting controls users could use to adjust their experiences, Facebook has decided to make the process of showing where information came from also becomes clearer -- "e.g. the website you may have visited or Page you may have liked."

As far as the updated Ad Preferences are concerned, users would now see two sections.

The first section would include advertisers who uploaded a list with users' information and used that list to run at least one ad in the past seven days and the second section aims to help users to understand third-party businesses who have uploaded and shared lists with their information.

The second section would let users see the business that initially uploaded a list, along with any advertiser who used that list to serve you an ad within the last 90 days.

"We're continuing to work to make ads more transparent and easier for you to control," Thulasi added.