It is no secret that Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp collect a significant amount of user data. But how much exactly? A new blog post by the makers of Signal, an open source secure messaging platform, indicates that it is quite a lot.

"You received this ad because you are a newlywed Pilates instructor and are obsessed with comic books," reads a sentence from an ad that Signal planned to place on Instagram. 'This ad used your location to show that you are in La Jolla (a suburb of San Diego). You are into parenting blogs and contemplating LGBTQ adoption"

.

"This ad was placed because you are a goth barista and single," another prospective ad reads.

"This ad uses your location to show that you are in Clinton Hill (a neighborhood in Brooklyn). And you are vegan or lactose intolerant and have really been feeling the yoga lately."

Signal planned to run these ads on Instagram, targeting people who fit these specific profiles.

"The ads only display some of the information that the ad platform uses and collects about its audience," Jun Harada of Signal explained in a Signal blog post on Tuesday (May 4).

Unfortunately, Harada added, "Facebook was not on board with the idea," and Signal's Facebook ad account was disabled.

That is unfortunate. As Harada explains in his blog post, "Most of the workings of the Internet today would be considered intolerable if replaced by an understandable real-world analogue, but they persist because they are invisible."

"Facebook's unique tools have the potential to reveal what would otherwise be invisible," he added. We wanted to use the same tools to highlight in a direct way how most technologies work."

We didn't quite understand what was going on here ourselves. Is Facebook collecting information about specific individuals and providing that information to advertisers? So we asked Harada (in Signal, of course) for more information.

He explained that it was the other way around. Facebook has a tool called Facebook Ad Manager that you can use yourself. [For example, a woman between the ages of 25 and 35 who likes country music, mountain biking, and liberal politics. You can also further fine-tune your ad to be seen in the ads that Signal wants to place.

Essentially, Harada said, you can use the Facebook Ad Manager to create an ideal target person; Facebook will find real people who are close to that ideal person and send ads to them.

Target audiences can be created based on location, interests, relationship status, hobbies, activities, ethnicity, education level, number of children, occupation, and, at least in the US, politics.

So it's not as creepy as Facebook pulling out all the details about you and me as individuals and sending it to advertisers. The advertisers will never see your actual data. But it is still quite unpleasant to read an ad that looks like it was made specifically for you.

At least it would have been if Facebook had allowed Signal to buy Instagram ads.

Ironically, Harada noted in a blog post that "transparency about how ads use people's data is apparently enough to get you banned from Facebook's ad platform."

"In the Facebook world, the only acceptable use is to hide what you are doing from your audience," he added.