Ghost Influence

So... a friend just sent me this as I'm known as "the guy who pranked his roommate with Facebook ads [1]." I'm also getting married on 11/11. This is absolutely brilliant. My partner and I [2] thank you for this. PM me, we'd love to invite you and your partner to our (digital) wedding. [1] http://ghostinfluence.com/prank [2] http://partnersinpresence.com

Yeah, the roommate story is great! You can read it here: The Ultimate Retaliation: Pranking My Roommate with Targeted Facebook Ads. https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roomma…

Here’s a write up: https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roomma… It’s harder to do this now, but think a bit - set the net wider and catch a few more, who cares! All you care is your target gets hit.

What about absurdly targeted spam just to mess with them? https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roomma…

On facebook it is possible to target a specific invidual. [2014] https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roomma… and more recent [2024] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39540738

Reminds me of the guy who pranked his roommate with Facebook ads targeted to an audience of one: https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roomma…

Nice (old) writeup of doing exactly that: http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roommat…

>I challenge the blowhards here to like, name one substantive harm someone has experienced from ad ID tracking on an iPhone. How quickly we forget/forgot this proof of concept: http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roommat…

They don't want to ban targeted ads based on political views? Is this because the politicians don't want to ban the techniques that they use to get reelected? And do they want to ban ads targeted by "customer lists". Both Google Facebook allow advertizers to upload email or FB-ID lists, and will target an ad to show it only to people on the list. This (http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roommat… feels a lot more spooky to me than advertizing target to wide categories like health - I don't want or need to see products that are are for menopausal women, impotent men, or deaf old people since I'm not in any of these category.

This guy already discovered this: https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roomma…

This has been possible for a while, people have even done it as a prank: https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roomma… The loophole to get round minimum audiences is easy - you use the target email address and add eg 99 people of the opposite gender. Then you set the audience ad to the target's gender. Though in principle Facebook should be able to check the effective reach of the ad and stop that.

Slightly related fun story from 2014: [1] http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roommat… Discussed on HN earlier: [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8330931

A bit dated and probably things have changed... but yes. http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roommat…

I think I have seen this link[0] posted a few times in related posts (I might have shared it as well). [0] http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roommat…

That’s so messed up. What do you think of advertisements for drugs in general? Have they been helpful finding treatment for your condition ? They are illegal where i’m from i believe (i’ve never seen one myself except in the us). Btw, this reminds of this absolutely hilarious story i think i first heard of here on HN: https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roomma…

Here's a guy targeting his roommate[0]. Previous discussion[1]. [0] https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roomma… [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8330931

Ads where you target a small number of people are of course cheap, making pranks like [1] possible for next to no cost. The interesting thing is can you cheaply run campaigns on influential people such a CEOs and politicians. I think you probably could! [1] https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roomma…

Here it is: http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roommat… TIL even the 20 user mine wasn’t required and today the min is only 100. I know for a fact that Trump 2016 used this technique with voter rolls to discourage turnout for likely Hillary voters based on a talk I watched by their media team.

There was a blog post a few years ago where a guy to get back at a prank from his room mate used target facebook ads to hit just him to make him feel crazy[0]. Also facebook has openly hijacked every political system on the planet, made that Fyre festival happen, and have been spewing data at near anonymous developer accounts for a decade. I think maybe this is a good thing that this company is being open about it. If this was illegal then all the "legit" people that have been abusing it would have something to worry about and many of them are very rich. I'm not sure the company using the services offered in the way they are designed is the real villain. [0] https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roomma…

I was expecting the article to link to that post. For those that haven't read it, here it is: https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roomma…

You certainly were able to at one point. http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roommat… I feel like I read about FB making some symbolic gesture to close this particular method (it seemed easily worked around) but my searching is coming up blank.

This reminds me of the guy who (claims to have) pranked his roommate with targeted Facebook ads: http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roommat…

I read that it's no longer possible to micro target ads in this way. Is it accurate or are there still ways to do it? PS: The link at the bottom of the page says that "This typeform is private" http://www.ghostinfluence.com/register

Reminds me of this story: http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roommat… Might have to try myself someday

Reminds me of this article where Brian Swichkow pranks his roommate with targeted ads that are hilarious http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roommat…

One guy used them to prank his roommate: http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roommat… (I was kind of disappointed that the "hypertargeted ad" link in the article went to a generic how-to article instead of that post.)

See e.g. this: http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roommat…

At least at one point, you could. See the example of the person who pranked his roommate through very specifically targeted facebook ads. [1] It's even mentioned in that article how to get around the fix they put in so you couldn't target a group of less than 20 people. I'm not sure if this particular method still works, but let's take a step back and think before we make claims about what is and is not possible in a complex system with lots features and knobs to twiddle. Whether this was an emergent feature from other features of the system or a specifically desired and designed behavior, at least at one point Facebook allowed very fine grained targeting. 1: http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roommat…