How are you influenced?
When you logged onto Facebook this morning, what adverts appeared in your timeline and how have they influenced your way of thinking? That is the question Louis Knight-Webb wants us all to ask ourselves, especially in the run-up to the General Election in the UK. Louis, a 19 year old tech entrepreneur from London, has created a browser plug-in called Who Targets Me? which directly reveals if a political party is using your personal data to influence the way you vote.
The plug-in has already been downloaded by thousands of people in Britain, so that they can see who is really behind the targeted ads that pop up in Facebook. Louis created it immediately after the snap election was called as a reaction the way the pro-Brexit campaigners used such ads. "It's clearly an issue that resonates with a lot of people," Knight-Webb told AFP. "There's a lot of people trying to understand how they're being manipulated."
With a week to go until the vote, it might be interesting to download the plug-in and see exactly which parties are using your Facebook info - in a method that is currently under investigation - to target specific adverts as a way to influence your decision.
Get the chrome extension at whotargets.me
