AdAnalyst

AdAnalyst

A tool to help you make sense of the ads you receive on Facebook

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  • Why do I receive these ads?
  • Who else receives it?
  • What does Facebook know about me?
  • Who is targeting me?


If you seek answers to the previous questions, then AdAnalyst is for you!

AdAnalyst is a browser addon that increases transparency in the Facebook Advertising ecosystem. It analyzes the ads you receive in Facebook and shows you what attributes Facebook has inferred about you, what attributes advertisers use to target you, and much much more.

It works silently in the background while you are browsing Facebook without any overhead to your browsing experience.

Overview

What can I do with AdAnalyst?

Once AdAnalyst is installed you are ready to start!

From the popup menu of the extension you can access the several services we provide!

Data

Check the attributes (interests, behaviors & demographics) that Facebook has inferred or collected about you!

Check the most frequent attributes used by advertisers to target you!

Advertisers


Check what advertisers target you & how!

Ads

A calendar with all the ads you receive and their targeting options!

How does it work?

What data we collect from you:

  • The ads you receive while you browse Facebook
  • The accompanied explanations that Facebook provides
  • Periodically, your Ads Preferences page
  • Hashed versions of your user id and email


What data we DO NOT collect from you:

  • Your messages
  • Your posts
  • Your likes
  • Anything else that we do not explicitly state


How is my data going to be used

Your data is going to be used in our research, but only in an aggregated way. Furthermore, we only collect anonimized traces of data.



Is my data going to be safe?

We will store your data in the servers of the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS), protected by the MPI-SWS firewall. You are the only one who can access your data through the Facebook Authentication process (no need to create a new account, no need to type any passwords)!

Installation

Just add the tool to   Chrome or   Firefox and then click on the plugin icon.



To finish the installation you need to agree to the Terms & Conditions!



To access your custom analysis, just click on the extension icon and navigate through our pages. The first time you visit the page you need to log in with Facebook. This step exists to ensure that only you will have access to your personal data!

Warning! If you are using some ad blocker like AdBlock Plus, you need to disable it on Facebook in order to get the most out of AdAnalyst. Also, AdAnalyst is not compatible with tracking protection settings, and third-party cookies should be allowed in your browser. Finally, you need to set your language in Facebook to English (US) or French (France). Currently, we do not support other languages.

Research

By using AdAnalyst, you are helping our research and keep making the internet more transparent

The following papers have been published thanks to AdAnalyst:

Who are we?















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