Researchers

Background

ORG is running a campaign to support the ongoing litigation by Tanya O’Carroll against Meta on the ‘Right to Object’. With the case scheduled for March 2025, we want to carry out research in advance to underpin our campaign and challenge the prevailing narratives Meta is leveraging.

We are looking for a researcher or researchers to carry out the following tasks. Please send applications for any or all of these tasks to recruitment@openrightsgroup.org by 10 am on 27 January 2025. Please outline your experience, day rate and proposed dates for completing the work. We anticipate day rates to be around £300-£400 depending on experience.

If you have any questions or would like an informal chat about the role, please contact: Jeanette Smith, jeannette@openrightsgroup.org

Research tasks

Evidencing how data-driven direct marketing creates ‘mass discrimination’.

We want to explore to extent to which there are groups that are unfairly treated by profiling, where sensitive personal characteristics can be profiled directly or indirectly, by using interests or groups as proxies for demographic categories. There has already been work done on this to evidence how it has been used to reinforce gender norms and limit opportunities for women, and how it has been used to exclude people from seeing ads for housing, credit or employment. Moreover, Facebook has allowed ads for alcohol, pharmaceuticals, and extreme weight loss to be targeted at children as young as 13.

We are looking to compile existing evidence, pulling together the studies that have already been carried out, and complement it with new research that fills in any gaps. This may include, but is not limited to, excluding racial or religious groups from certain adverts, or targeting more susceptible groups with harmful adverts e.g. adverts targetted at those with a history of addiction or economically marginalised communities.

We anticipate this will be up to 15 days’ work.

Demonstrating the business model is viable without profiling.

We want to assess the historical growth of Meta and Google and other big tech actors, focusing on how earlier periods in their development evidence that advertising is still profitable without profiling. One of Meta’s arguments has been that profiling is the only way that their business model is viable: without it, they and many other tech companies could not afford to offer their services. We want to undermine this argument by carrying out desk research around their finances, pre-profiling, to show that advertising alone was enough to sustain their model.

We would also work with publishers to highlight how enforcement is harming the industry and benefitting big tech, as mainstream media works to be compliant to its cost, while bad actors are permitted to bend the rules.

We anticipate this will be up to fours days’ work.

Exploring the links between profiling and disinformation.

We know that surveillance advertising has been linked to disinformation more broadly, but we think it would be worth collating and growing the body of evidence specifically for Meta. We want someone to carry out a literature review of existing research and evidence into the extent that profiling has allowed and facilitated the spread of disinformation, and the extent that this process is fuelling polarisation and an erosion of democracy.

We anticipate this will be up to ten days’ work.