Credit where credit’s due (An update on the Facebook saga)

I posted last week about my frustration regarding Facebook’s targeted advertising, and I received a reply from Beaming Baby (the company which had been advertising nappies to me when I’d just had a miscarriage).

In the interests of fairness I thought I would let you know how they responded:

Thank you for your message and please accept my apologies for this late reply – I have been away from the office for the week and am just catching up now.

I am so sorry you are receiving our unwanted adverts on your wall and that they have caused you distress and upset. Unfortunately facebook control who see our ads so we cannot stop our ads coming to you specifically. However, if you hover over our ad with your mouse, a cross will appear in the top right corner. When you click this you will get an option to choose “I don’t want to see this” or “Hide all from Beaming Baby” and that way you can block anything you do not wish to see.

I hope this helps and please accept our sincerest apologies for any upset caused.

Kind regards

[Name] Beaming Baby

 

By this time I had worked out how to turn off the targeted advertising and had also cooled down a bit from my initial upset. (The original message was something along the lines of How could you? I don’t want to see baby adverts! I’ve just had a miscarriage!)

I replied:

I’m sorry if I overreacted. I’ve since managed to find out how to block the targeted advertising around babies and pregnancy.

You’d be amazed to hear how hurtful it is for those suffering from infertility and pregnancy loss… It is a frequent topic of conversation in the (infertility) blogging community. The point is that we haven’t chosen to “like” any baby related pages but Facebook algorithms have somehow assumed we do. We have to go and fix our settings because it’s just assumed that we must want to be advertised about babies.

Anyway I appreciate your response and I apologise again if I was rude. I was just upset.

Thanks

[Nara]

 

I then had another reply from Beaming Baby:

No need to apologise and you were not at all rude. Let’s hope facebook manage to fine tune their systems soon so that this sort of thing can be avoided.

With best wishes

[Name] Beaming Baby

 

To be fair, I think their response was pretty good. I thought it only fair to give an update! (Maybe if I ever have a baby, I’ll consider using their nappies…)