Tech research and ethics, data visualization, UX/UI design, and writing professional.
We don’t know exactly how Facebook knows exactly what ads to show us—because they won’t tell us. But I wanted to know if I could make connections between my actual online behavior and what Facebook thinks my online behavior is by using the data Facebook does make available.
You can view the full visualization here.
Using Facebook’s Ad Preferences, I pulled 200 “interest categories” that Facebook has put me in, as well as the full list of Facebook Pages and Groups I've liked and joined. I manually mapped each interest against a Page or Group to understand the connections between my actual behavior and Facebook’s perception of my behavior.