Facebook ’s big data - partake scandal apology tour remain on Wednesday with the annunciation the site would be cancelling its “ Partner Categories ” advertising section , in which the internet site partners with third - company data brokers to aggregate even more monetizable selective information about users .
Per theWall Street Journal , Facebook is under the feeling that this will somehow help dispel the ( entirely accurate ) opinion that the site has aggregated too much data about its user :
The measure , part of which Facebook announced late Wednesday , affect a group of so - scream data brokers such as Acxiom Corp. and Oracle Corp. ’s Oracle Data Cloud , formerly known as DataLogix , that tuck shopping and other selective information on consumers that Facebook for year has integrate into the advertizing - targeting system that is at the core of its business .
Facebook said it is end an ad - targeting option called Partner Categories that let such data broker target specific group of Facebook users — the great unwashed who buy a sure mathematical product , for example — on behalf of their ad clients . Facebook believe shut out that organization down “ will help improve people ’s seclusion on Facebook , ” Graham Mudd , intersection selling director at Facebook , said in a place Wednesday .
Facebook will to boot block off providing “ anonymized data from its platform to such data brokers ” for the purpose of valuate advertizing - cause effectiveness , reservoir tell the Journal . Another good example of the kind of company that might be impacted by the shifting , Recode noted , is credit - reporting agency Experian , which has records on hundreds of millions of citizenry in the US .
As the Journal wrote , some of these factor have huge “ ream of information on the great unwashed ’s purchases , household income , and other characteristic ” that the Partner Categories tool match with Facebook users for advertisers . That meant third party could place Facebook users withvery exact adseven if they put minimal information into the site . Per the Journal , though , the scope of this modification is undecipherable :
… Many marketers have their own consumer datum that they upload to Facebook and use in ad campaigns — a exercise not affected by the new change .
Still , some adult advertizing categories will be cramp . “ This will be brutal for advertisers ” that do not have first party data on their customer such as consumer merchandise companies who depend hard on the information from third party datum firms , said one ad buyer .
In other watchword , while this decision might improve privacy to some stage , cease Partner Categories mostly impacts Facebook ’s ad point putz and eliminates one possible way by which data point could be leaked in the hereafter . It ’s yet another change that likely should have been made before but was n’t until Facebook needed to throw up a public charm offensive , like its announcement today it will be rolling its web of concealment settingsinto one screen .
If this policy was in position before , it would not have changed anything with heed to the Cambridge Analytica scandal , which involve permissions in prior interpretation of Facebook ’s API that gave a funny app the power to accumulate extended data on up to 50 million user without their consent . That tilt has now resulted in the company ’s stock falling bynearly 20 percent , an ongoingFederal Trade Commission investigation , and delaying the launching of its in - home surveillance devicesmart speaker . Tweaking the ad model at the margin does n’t really directly direct the primal concern , which is that encompassing pools of Facebook user data point are apparently drift out there , and the companionship does not yet knowhow many othersmay have access to it .
[ Wall Street Journal / Recode ]
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