Comment by to11mtm
1 year ago
Agreed that '3rd party ad' is a weird qualifier.
For starters, what's '3rd party'? I remember when Google-Fi or whatever it was had the poorly animated, jingle sung-by-a 'totally not trying to cop Randy Newman vibe' ads. Would that be a 3rd party in that case?
Third party in this case could be two things at least.
One, an advertisement that is about something that provided by someone who is not Meta - like a Nike shoe, or a law firm.
Two, third party could imply that the data left the Meta ecosystem - like how if you visit a blog, and there is a Google Adsense banner, then your visitation data left the blog, the first party, to end up at Google, a third party, and possibly others, again, third parties.
I am making this "third party" distinction, because I think that this is a significant step in what it takes to make advertisements "dystopian", which is the premise of the original post. I think that the situation that OP encountered, that he used a service, and then service itself did something unexpected, is not at all dystopian. However, what the title posited, that his face is now used for targeted advertisements, has much more far-reaching implications - like, for example, it could be the next Cambridge Analytica scandal.