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Here's someone who was harmed: http://gawker.com/5671582/how-facebooks-targeted-ads-revealed-one-users-sexuality http://gawker.com/5671582/how-facebooks-target

• repolfx 8y ago
  Interesting research but no actual harm was done - the researcher experimented on a friend whom she already knew was gay, and Facebook made changes to close that glitch. Being able to do such things is certainly not an intentional part of their ad system. I only skimmed parts of the paper but I also question the premise. It seems the attack is entirely dependent on you being 100% sure your ad is so carefully targeted it'll only show to a single person. If there's any doubt at all that it might match even two people, the attack doesn't work. Seems rather hard to pull off in anything other than lab conditions.