According to Facebook, the social network rarely uses the content of your status updates and wall posts to profile you. Facebook's paying advertisers tell a different story. Ad Age interviewed companies targeting pregnant women on Facebook. These marketers reported Facebook reps telling them that they can indeed identify their audience by targeting specific keywords that show up in users' conversations. Facebook's own Data Use Policy supports this version, stating that "key words from your stories" are used to deliver ads.
Pregnancy is an excellent example of a conversation topic that many users would prefer to keep private. Whether rarely used or not, Facebook is deciding when to read your posts and what to do with the information it gleans from them. Now Facebook users can make this decision for themselves. Installing scrambls keeps your Facebook posts private, preventing the content of your personal messages being used as a "signal" to advertisers.