Targeted ads, the kind that might appear on your Facebook feed or Twitter timeline, can feel awfully invasive; after all, they often appear using personal information like your location, age or search history. And thanks to a new service making waves on social media, they’re likely about to target you even more closely.
Recently, if you’ve ever stumbled across a tweet or Instagram in which a celebrity posts their “phone number” so that they can interact with and text you directly, it’s not what you think—instead of entering into a personal chat with a celebrity, you’ve actually subscribed to a newsletter of automated updates that’ll be sent by text.
Back in October, reporter Taylor Lorenz described how it works in detail for the New York Times. If you “text” a celebrity using this number, you’re likely signing up for a service run by a tech-startup called Community; they help manage direct messaging with large audiences on behalf of celebrities and other well-known figures, as a way of “monetizing” their social network.
Once you opt-in by way of text, what kind of updates might you receive? Well, it depends. Sometimes, it’s just a random string of photos and texts, as Lorenz received from actor Ashton Kutcher. I signed up for Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau’s updates and just received a bunch of updates about their tour.
If you’re really, really lucky, you could a text back from the celebrity in question—but don’t count on it. Given the number of messages they likely receive, it would seem like a huge effort just to respond to every text. The vast majority of the time, you’re likely only at the receiving end of these automated updates.
If you’re a particular fan of a celebrity, maybe signing up isn’t such a bad idea. But we’ll do you a favor and tell you now that it probably isn’t worth it. The odds are incredibly low that you’ll receive a text that isn’t just an automated update, and while Community ensures that they will not sell your personal details to other third parties, well, we’ve all heard that bef
