Ad Observer
What is Ad Observer?
Extension stats
- storage
- unlimitedStorage
Ranking
Extension summary
Ad Observer is a crowdsourcing tool that will gather ads from a user's Facebook news feed—to enable investigative journalism and research.
The project has new home and a new name. It is run by the Online Political Ads Transparency Project at New York University. This project used to be called the Political Ad Collector. Stewardship of the project was previously maintained by Quartz, The Globe and Mail and by ProPublica.
When users log into Facebook, the tool will collect the ads displayed on the user's news feed and guess which ones are political.
The tool does not collect any personally identifiable information. We will not know which ads are shown to which user. The political ads that are collected will be contributed to a database.
We use the ads for research and journalistic purposes: covering Facebook, political messaging and digital advertising tactics.
User reviews
These summaries are automatically generated weekly using AI based on recent user reviews.
Chrome Web Store does not verify user reviews, so some user reviews may be inaccurate,
spammy, or outdated.- Important tool for accountability
- Helps document deceptive political advertising
- Provides information to media organizations
- Great idea and cause
- Causes disruptions to using Facebook
- Breaks Chrome startup settings
- Issues with usability and functionality
- Important tool for accountability
- Causes disruptions to using Facebook
- Breaks Chrome startup settings
Recent reviews
Venator, 2020-07-11 
M R, 2019-09-17 
Nicholas, 2018-10-30Extension safety
Risk impact
Ad Observer requires very minimum permissions.
Risk likelihood
Ad Observer has earned a fairly good reputation and likely can be trusted.
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