Facebook Knows

You know that one person who seems to make a point to know every single detail about your life and then judges what you might like to talk about based off of those things? To a certain degree, we all do this, and it might even be a good thing in moderation. When it's all they talk about, though, I start to feel like that person is convinced that that is my only interest and saying absolutely anything else to me will make me either run off waving my hands in a fit of anger or drop dead spontaneously from the insurmountable task of comprehending this new, foreign concept. This is the way Facebook has been treating me lately and I don't like it.

Facebook has always tried to act like it knows the lives of its users. This used to manifest itself in really helpful features--People You May Know and Recommended Pages, for example. Most recently, they began to personalize their advertisements, which is a really good idea on paper. The problem is that the service, when implemented, is a bit... single-minded.

I'm one of those lucky people who lives in a town where I can be at least 73% sure that putting my sexual orientation on my Facebook will not result in a congregation of devotees performing an exorcism outside my door. (Although, come to think of it, I do live three doors down from a church...) One night, after watching a really sappy frustrated-gay-men romcom my mom put in the Netflix queue for me as a teaching moment, I got up the courage to fill the "interested in" box on my Facebook profile. Either no one saw it or no one was surprised (I can't imagine why; I'm totally the motorcycle-riding football-watching boob and beer enthusiast type), but one thing did come of this: Facebook's advertising engine became that friend that always talks about the same thing.

The trouble is that Facebook's advertisements aren't always tactful, either. Of the ads I see, 3/4 of them roughly resemble these two:



Don't get me wrong, I understand their arithmetic.

Male + Interested in: Men + Single + Almost always online on Friday nights + Watches romantic comedies frequently enough to suggest desperation = Interest in dating services

They just don't have to be so accurate.

Then, sometimes, they just get offensive, like this one:



I mean, come on, Facebook. Really? Does it really look like that's a book I'd-- nevermind. Don't want to know the answer to that.