Antisocial giant surprisingly vocal in dismissing chat app rival’s ‘stunt’
Encrypted messaging service Signal on Tuesday made a show of trolling Instagram and its parent company Facebook by creating ads that incorporated audience targeting categories into its ad copy. The ads address viewers by identifying targeting criteria like lifestyle categories, occupation, geographic location, and personal interests presumably gleaned through online data collection. Apart from the marketing value of tweaking a dominant messaging rival, Signal did so, it claims, to expose the inner workings of ad tech data collection. “The way most of the internet works today would be considered intolerable if translated into comprehensible real world analogs, but it endures because it is invisible,” the secure-messaging org explained in a blog post. Signal suggests its gambit was intolerable to Instagram and Facebook, claiming that Facebook banned its ad account for exposing ad tech data harvesting. “Facebook is more than willing to sell visibility into people’s lives, unless it’s to tell people about how their data is being used,” Signal said. “Being transparent about how ads use people’s data is apparently enough to get banned; in Facebook’s world, the only acceptable usage is to hide what you’re doing from your audience.” Facebook, however, has dismissed Signal’s account of what happened as a marketing scheme. “This is a stunt by Signal, [which] never even tried to actually run these ads – and we didn’t shut down their ad account for trying to do so,” a Facebook spokesperson told The Register in an email. “If Signal had tried to run the ads, a couple of them would have been rejected because our advertising policies prohibit ads that assert that you have a specific medical condition or sexual orientation, as Signal should know.
