from Hacker News

The retaliation: Pranking my roommate with targeted Facebook ads (2014)

by CountHackulus on 2/13/23, 9:19 PM with 65 comments

  • by stuaxo on 2/13/23, 11:22 PM

    And here was it used for in seriousness https://inews.co.uk/news/labour-staff-deceived-corbyn-facebo...

    Staff of the UKLabour party deceived the leader at the time by making very targetted facebook ads, so it would look to him like they were doing what the campaign as they were meant to be, while they were actually trying to undermine him.

  • by htrp on 2/13/23, 10:55 PM

  • by jvalencia on 2/14/23, 12:49 AM

    Reading the comments, it is worth noting that to target someone directly, you just need them to visit a site with a re-targeting pixel. They load an ad 1x1 pixel image that lets google set a cookie to re-target that user when they are shown google ads: https://ads.google.com/intl/en_uk/home/resources/retargeting...

    Replace Google with your ad provider.

  • by justusthane on 2/14/23, 2:08 AM

    Hilarious, although I am a bit disappointed. I was expecting an extremely specific demographic filter to target his roommate (e.g. “white males in their mid twenties who live in Philadelphia and like Slipknot and Beanie Babies”). I didn’t realize you could target based on email addresses!

  • by ifdefdebug on 2/14/23, 9:29 AM

    Ok, so here I go... No, this was NOT "very well played", because the pranker, when he was confronted by the pranked, resorted to a flat-out lie: "but it’s not me", basically shutting down the only avenue leading to truth, short of accusing a roommate and friend of being a liar. AFAIAC, that lie transformed the prank into deception. He should be happy the roommate took it so easy.

    Also why do we see two different versions of the final ad?

  • by yesenadam on 2/14/23, 1:14 AM

    The main takeaway for me was that dark red writing on dark grey is absolutely unreadable! I tried but couldn't make out the red words at all.

  • by 762236 on 2/13/23, 11:04 PM

    How do I target my daughter on TikTok?

  • by pcardoso on 2/13/23, 11:09 PM

    I wonder how much of this is still possible.

    I have been trying to define an audience (ie, people who work at surfing schools), without much success.

  • by backtoyoujim on 2/14/23, 2:02 AM

    When I was first asked to some facebook ads for a company that I was actually doing industrial sewing work in a production environment ... I saw how targeted everything could be with the ads and it just seemed so gross. That was 2009-ish.

    And I haven't had a facebook account for me to edit since then. I'm glad some people saw levity, but to me it just seemed dour.

  • by bilekas on 2/14/23, 7:20 AM

    Thia is the first time I've read this but so damn good! I'm going to NEED to read this again for a giggle in the future!!

  • by IYasha on 2/14/23, 2:05 PM

    There's some contradiction in this story: being "extremely smart" and using facebook. Without adblock. )

  • by lofaszvanitt on 2/14/23, 3:12 AM

    That's why you don't have FB ads. It's so easy to kill them. Btw, I never understood why people get a hard on when pranking someone.

  • by freitzkriesler2 on 2/13/23, 11:13 PM

    What creepy albeit hilarious fun. Partly the reason I block ads is because of ad targeting. It gets way too creepy.

    Unrelated, back in the 90s and early 00s, I used to troll people in my grade by signing up their email addresses for porn. Since most people had emails their parents monitored, this would inevitably lead to awkward questions.

    I also would script kiddy people with aik bots that would boot them offline. The magic of computes with limited resources.

  • by counterpartyrsk on 2/16/23, 1:22 AM

    Genius roommate, yet doesn't run ad-blocker?

  • by prhrb on 2/13/23, 11:08 PM

    That's very scary