You misunderstand. What parent poster mentioned is that he wants to know which ads are targeted towards their parents and the only way to know that is stand behind them, because there is no easy way to get this data from Facebook.
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Should everyone be able to see which ads targeted at their peers? Still seems like an invasion of privacy.
The invasion of privacy starts with the act of tracking peoples' behavior and using that data to target ads.
It's also not about knowing what a specific user sees. The targeting configurations that advertisers use should be made public, but nobody needs to know which individual users see which individual ads.
So, you should be able to click a "?" link in the corner of any ad and see which demographics or groups the ad is targeting. And likewise, you should be able to look at individual demographics or groups and see which ads are targeting them at any given moment.
This sort of transparency would go a long way towards restoring trust, but I suspect that it would also reveal what a cesspit their ad market is. The advertisers would also probably object, because many would consider their targeting parameters to be a sort of trade secret. And whoever pays the piper calls the tune.
> So, you should be able to click a "?" link in the corner of any ad and see which demographics or groups the ad is targeting.
You can do this on Facebook, for maybe four years now. It's not particularly informative, but it exists.
A third party paid another third party to show very specific content to very specific people based on their very very private data - this is the primary violation of privacy. Being able to tell who pays who to show what is fundamental to transparency in democracy.