1. Politieke Advertentie Analyse van Digitale Campagnes (PAADC)

PAADC is a web browser plugin developed by Algorithm Exposed, a research group at the University of Amsterdam. The browser plugin harvests public posts the user sees in their Facebook newsfeed, in order to look into personal and political advertisement practices and to investigate the influence these advertisements have on voting behaviour. The plugin is available for Chrome and Firefox browser.



This plugin is a part of a collaborative research project involving Dutch Publisher De Volkskrant, polling desk I&O Research and the University of Amsterdam.



2. Data collection

We take privacy very seriously, and therefore we are taking steps to minimize the data that is collected while still providing us the insights we need.



To understand how personal and political advertising takes place, we need to understand what advertisements the user actually sees. That means we need to collect public data from the users timeline. No private messages will be taken into account.

If you install the extension, we collect:

Your Facebook user ID
The date and time each time you refresh your Newsfeed;
The date and time of the impression of every post on your Newsfeed;
The position of every post in your Newsfeed;
The HTML section of every advertisement in your Newsfeed.


3. Privacy and opt-out

Here is how we are protecting your privacy:
Opt-in to take part in PAADC: you have to opt in by installing the web browser addon. We make it very clear that you are taking part in the research, and we make you jump through some extra hoops to make sure you understand what you are signing up for.
Public posts: PAADC only collects posts that are flagged as “Public” on Facebook, meaning anyone in the world could view these posts, even if they do not have a Facebook account. “Public” posts are explained on the Facebook help site. We only harvest your public NewsFeed, not the private content that you upload to your own profile.
Opt-out: According to the Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, when you post something as Public, you are allowing anyone to use it – including us. If you want to opt out of PAADC entirely, you can do so by uninstalling the plugin.

5. Data usage

We will use the information we collect only for the purposes of understanding the personalized and political advertisement, improving the plugin, and improving our methodology. Data harvested by PAADC will be made accessible to researchers of the University of Amsterdam. Research results and insights will be made public through both academic and journalist articles. No personal identifiable data will be present in any publication. We will never sell or share your personally identifiable information with anyone else.



6. Timespan and data retention

Data collection will end automatically after the Dutch elections took place, April 18th 2021 the latest. The data collection will afterwards be deactivated and will no further collect any user data. Data can be retained for a maximum of three years for research purposes.



7. Opt-out

You can stop participating in the research at any given time. If you want us to stop collecting your information after the tool has been activated, just uninstall the web browser addon (read instructions here). If you want us to delete the information we’ve already collected, please send a request to info@algorithms.exposed.



8. Third parties

For data storage we work with Greenhost, with whom we have a data processing agreement in place.



This privacy statement may be subject to changes, any changes will be indicated below.