Facebook Pushes Users to List Their Current City, Which Helps Advertisers

Facebook is using a new “Which city do you live in?” sidebar module to prompt users to list more personal information in their profile. The module suggests a city based on a user’s other data and connections, and allows them to add that city to their profile with a single click. Current city is one of the most valuable pieces of data to advertisers because permits location-specific ad targeting. Since Facebook sell access to this data in an anonymized form, pushing users to list their current city assists Facebook’s monetization efforts.