Unexpected and Unpredictable: Factors That Make Personalized Advertisements Creepy

Personalized advertisements are the price we have to pay for free social media platforms. Various studies have been carried out on user acceptance of such advertisements in general and most countries have adopted laws and regulations with respect to privacy and data protection. However, not all advertisements evoke the same responses: some ads are considered more annoying, intrusive or creepy than others. In this paper, we present the results of an observational study on user responses to actual Facebook advertisements. The results show that mismatches in terms of context, unexpected data collection or inference, overly generic explanations and repetition are common causes of anxiety and distrust.