New Delhi: Facebook gave you a free tool to add a rainbow filter to your profile picture and join in the celebrations of the US ruling that legalized same-sex marriages in the country, but it could be a subtle way of targeting ads at you.
A report on BGR notes that while the social network hasn’t firmly denied tracking these pictures, there have been instances in the past that it has conducted such experiments to monitor user behavior.
Although a Facebook spokesperson assured, “This was not an experiment or test, but rather something that enables people to show their support of the LGBTQ community on Facebook. We aren’t going to use this as a way to target ads and the point of this tool is not to get information about people,” it is nonetheless scary to imagine user support being tracked for targeted ads.
Recently, the world’s largest social network was embroiled in a controversy when it was discovered that it allegedly tracked users in the EU, who were even not members on the site.
The company later claimed that the findings were inaccurate and it has fixed the bug that inadvertently tracked users who did not have Facebook accounts in the region.
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