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I’m confused. The premise of this post seems to be that this is some malicious attempt to deduce basic geographic data on Facebook users. But doesn’t Facebook let you target ads based on such data already?

Why would I not just pay Facebook directly for such targeting?

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The implication is that comments on public posts could be scraped by a third party to build an off-FB psychographic profile, similar to how Cambridge Analytica tried to generate profiles for users by querying data through a third party Facebook app.

I believe the goal is to build a model that correlates public attributes that FB provides with hidden attributes learned from these probes. When the attacker is ready to target users matching specific hidden attributes, they can reverse the correlation into ranges of public attributes that FB will accept for targeting ad campaigns.

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