Home

Computing

News

AI can reconstruct your personal profile just from the ads you see online.

Vazhnik / Pexels

You might think the ads you scroll past every day are just background noise. But a new research suggests they’re doing a lot more than selling you things. The study found that AI can analyze the ads shown to you online and reconstruct sensitive personal details about you (via UNSW ).

That includes your political preferences, education level, employment status, age, gender, and broader financial situation. The scary part is that you don’t need to click anything; just seeing the ads is enough.

How does this actually work?

Researchers analyzed over 435,000 Facebook ads shown to 891 users, collected through a citizen science initiative called the Australian Ad Observatory.…