Meta and Google secretly teamed up to target minors with advertisements, reports the Financial Times. The paywalled story is summarized by The Verge and details complete disregard for the promises made after earlier privacy complaints—and the companies' own policies. Meta is parent company of Facebook and Instagram.
The publication reports that Google directed ads to a subset of users labeled as "unknown" in its advertising systems, in an attempt to disguise the group skewed toward teenagers. According to a Google Ads help page, the "unknown" demographic category refers to people whose age, gender, parental status, or household income are supposedly unidentified, and can allow advertisers to reach "a significantly wider audience" when selected. However, Google could use app downloads and online activity to determine "with a high degree of confidence" that the "unknown" group was populated by younger users, reports the FT. Google staffers are said to have used this loophole to get around the company's own policies, having introduced rules that block ad targeting based on "age, gender, or interests of people under 18" back in 2021.
Spark Foundry, part of ad giant Publicis, worked with the companies to launch the illicit campaign in Canada in the spring of this year and in the U.S. in May.
"We prohibit ads being personalized to people under-18, period," Google said in a statement to the publication. "We'll also be taking additional action to reinforce with sales representatives that they must not help advertisers or agencies run campaigns attempting to work around our policies."
After years of complaints, lawsuits and regulatory efforts, nothing is actually stopping them do this stuff. It's a bad feeling.
The exploitation of children is the thing, but it also hints at the competitive advantages that platforms have over their own advertisers. They know more about the audience, and that aspect of the advertiser's business, than they disclose. And all the advertiser gets in return some algorithmically-filtered customer attention. Advertising on these black-boxed social media platforms is like dining alone with Hannibal Lecter: he's going to tell you everything you didn't know about yourself, it won't help you in any way whatsoever, and you might get eaten. This situation is especially bad on Amazon, according the Wall Street Journal in 2020, where the platform directly competes with its own sellers.
