I understand the reason some people are upset with this, but one issue I find interesting is that this is exactly how 'fair' advertising works, but implicitly.

I understand the reason some people are upset with this, but one issue I find interesting is that this is exactly how 'fair' advertising works, but implicitly. For instance if I advertise a position in, as some random example, Popular Mechanics, I'm going to get an extremely biased sample. And I'm putting my position there specifically because I want to appeal to that demographic. This is also why, for instance, in times past if you stayed at home and watched broadcast television there would be a disproportionate number of ads for things such as tampons, diapers (adult and child alike), and job injury lawyers. It was targeting the demographic watching television at that time. Perhaps one fair solution here would be an opt-in demographic profile override. What a mouth full. What I mean is that if you want, you can require Facebook to set your demographics to whatever you like. In other words, imagine you're a woman and you want to be shown ads targeting men, well you can opt-in to require your account profile to be a hit for man or woman. The curious thing is that I imagine almost nobody would actually choose to opt-in there. It'd probably be more used as a protest tool to destroy the value of advertising (by large numbers of people opting into everything), than a tool to get more ads you're interested in. Can't say I'm particularly upset by that outcome though.