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A founder asked how to reach ADHD users without exposing them to Meta
In short
At the 2024 Melbourne technology panel, an app founder in the audience said a Facebook ad and pixel would flag users’ ADHD to Meta. The panel answered with the channels they used instead.
Read it instead, 5 minutesThe transcript
The story
A founder in the audience put a question to the technology panel at the 2024 Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Melbourne that none of the panellists could fully answer. The founder’s app helps people with ADHD hold their focus. A user tells it what they are trying to do for the next hour, such as writing a report, and the app uses AI to check whether each website they open is a rabbit hole or something they actually need. Kyriakos Gold, who hosted the session, told the room that the founder had been at the symposium the year before, and the founder gave an update: the app had gone through the Remarkable accelerator, described as an excellent program for disability tech entrepreneurs, had 250 paying users, and had a contract with a university.
The advice the founder was now getting was to run Facebook ads. “I feel very torn about that,” the founder said. Running an ad that targeted the ADHD demographic, and putting a Facebook pixel on the app’s website, which the founder said they did not want to do, would let Meta know that a particular person had clicked on an ad about ADHD and gone on to the site. That, the founder said, probably feeds into the profile Meta holds about that person. The founder imagined the same was true of TikTok. Someone who watched a founder’s videos and then visited the founder’s website was, in effect, confirming to the platform that they were autistic. The founder asked the panel how they dealt with it.
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Sources the story draws on
- Facebook Announces Removal of Targeting Options Related to Sensitive Topics (opens in a new tab), Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz, Advertising Law Updates
- FTC to Ban BetterHelp from Revealing Consumers' Data, Including Sensitive Mental Health Information, to Facebook and Others for Targeted Advertising (opens in a new tab), United States Federal Trade Commission
- Privacy Commissioner finds privacy breaches in third-party tracking pixel investigation (opens in a new tab), Office of the Australian Information Commissioner
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