You have rather succinctly noted that sodding huge walled off communities come and go, with time. ::FAC3:B00C: is already very old school and largely irrelevant. They just haven't noticed yet.
Source? It's always been my understanding that while smaller players do this, the major ad players - Meta, Google, etc - never do this: Data on everyone is their greatest competitive advantage, and they don't want to give it away!
You don't have, but many sites you visit have a Facebook code hidden in their pages that sends data about any visitor to Facebook. Thus Facebook knows a lot about you even if you don't have an account.
I'll answer but I don't think you want one/it... They're different. That's why. Simple.
One you're giving them information/still seeing ads
The other, they're guessing and you're free from the mind rot. Distance surely hurts their accuracy.
Can't stop them guessing but you can stop being their authoritative source. You've heard the whole, "we're in charge of our response, not the problem", right?
That's a great answer, thank you! Yeah, "someone non-consensually has low-accuracy information on me" is experientially different than "someone is using (more-accurate) information on me to serve me ads". The former's still not _great_ (they can still pass that information to other people which could lead to bad experiences), but it's still much better than the latter. Thanks for the clarification!
I have a hard time believing that Facebook does a particularly good job with its shadow profiles. They can't even figure out which continent I live on or narrow my age down to more than a couple decades off.
For the times I need to wade thru the muck mbasic + adblock means the only ads I see are recommended groups. Those are usually history geeks focused on cities thousands of miles away from anywhere I've been in the past decade.
Same situation for me. Basically the only ads I ever see in my native language are for American expat tax services (I’m not American, have never visited the continent and have never expressed interest in doing so).
Sometimes I wonder just how good this adtech really all is when the best they can do is figure out I speak English (browser language) and live not in an English speaking country (IP address) and just assume therefore I am American.
That's probably less to do with Meta and their tech than a marketer setting up their ads in the way you describe (language: english, country: yours). I'm not sure you can even target nationality at all.
A lot of the filtering of whom to show ads to is heuristics to try and target 'high value costumers'. Getting target with very irrelevant ads might just mean you are considered low value by most advertisers so you get served ads from advertisers willing to pay very little per impression.
I'd take as a signal your online cloaking is working as intended. I often get very random ads and recommendations in languages I don't even speak so I think my online anonimity fu is working as intended.
I set my language to English (Pirate) a long time ago to similar effect.
The option has been removed since, making me part of an ever shrinking community of essentially random people - not a particularly interesting target for advertisers.
My hack is to live in a country where the local language is not my own, and not the one I have set in my Facebook settings.
As a result, Facebook rarely has advertisements that can target me, because my language has been filtered out by the advertisers.
When one does appear, it’s nearly always in the local language, so I’m kind of deaf to it and I’m not going to actively respond to anyway.
Luckily they haven’t figured that out yet, even though I’ve been an Facebook user for many years.