AdAnalyst

AdAnalyst

Did you know that anyone can target you with ads on Facebook? Political campaigners, low quality shoes shops and even your neighbour? We designed AdAnalyst to help you analyze who targets you with ads and why so that you can detect if an advertiser is trying to deceive you. AdAnalyst allows you to check:

What advertisers are targeting you?

Who else receives the same ads as you?

What does Facebook know about you?

Installation

Note! We have developed a new extension, we named AdImpact, that will allow us to analyze the posts you receive from news media organisations and investigate what ads are they targeting you with. You can install it on your browser on this link. For more details, visit this website.

Add to   Chrome or   Firefox

Click on the extension icon.

Sign the consent.

Log in to see statistics about your ads.

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.

How does it work?

AdAnalyst analyzes the ads you receive in Facebook to show you aggregate statistics about the ads and the advertisers that target you. It works silently in the background while you are browsing Facebook without any overhead to your browsing experience.

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, email and phone number


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. All traces of data are pseudonymized before they arrive on our servers.



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.

Ad Statistics

Click on the popup menu of the extension to access the services we provide.

Data

See what Facebook thinks you are interested in and what attributes advertisers use most frequetly to target you.

Advertisers


Who are the advertisers that target you? You can browse advertisers by categories and check all political parties that targeted you.

Ads

A calendar with all the ads you receive and their targeting options. You can see who else is seeing the same ads.

Research

AdAnalyst is the result of our research efforts in making targeted advertising more transparent and safe. Want to lean more about our research? Here are our papers:

Who are we?



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