Engineers from the Telematics department of the Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M) have developed a new computer tool that, through a simple click, allows you to view the advertising revenue generated by each Facebook user . They have done so within the framework of the European research project TYPES (Towards transparency and Privacy in the online advertising BusinesS; in Spanish, ‘Towards transparency and privacy in the online advertising business’) of the Horizon 2020 program.
The tool, which is free to use and has received the name of FDVT ( Facebook Data Valuation Tool), is partially funded by the Data Transparency Lab, an initiative promoted by MIT, Telefónica and Mozilla aimed at promoting transparency on the Internet and raising awareness to the Internet user of the importance of protecting their digital privacy .
The FDVT application is already running on Facebook and in the Chrome browser, and it helps to visualize in real time the advertising revenue generated by a user’s browsing on this platform. If you are interested in using it, you must download it and provide data such as your age, gender, marital status, interests, location, etc., in order for the tool to identify the economic value of your profile in the volatile advertising market.
Each user ‘has a price’
“Obviously, each of us has a price, therefore, the tool will give you the assessment that you are generating, ” explain the brothers Ángel and Rubén Cuevas, UC3M professors and developers of this application together with José González, a PhD student.
“When you connect to Facebook and receive an ad, what we do is get the valuation, the price that advertisers pay to show that ad to you, as well as the price that those advertisers pay for each click you make on one of those ads. “, they add.
“We do not want to demonize neither Facebook, nor Google, nor any other platform for generating profits with advertising , a sector that undoubtedly generates economic growth and employment, ” they insist. What is intended is that companies with this type of tools act with transparency when it comes to reporting what they do with third-party data.
