Facebook Curbing Information From Outside Data Brokers
March 28 2018 - 6:35PM
Dow Jones News
By Deepa Seetharaman, Georgia Wells and Suzanna Vranica
Facebook Inc. is curbing the information that it exchanges with
companies that collect and sell consumer data for advertisers, as
the social-media giant tries to calm an uproar over its handling of
personal information.
The measures, part of which Facebook announced late Wednesday,
affect a group of so-called data brokers such as Acxiom Corp. and
Oracle Corp.'s DataLogix unit that gather shopping and other
information on consumers that Facebook for years has incorporated
into the ad-targeting system that is at the core of its
business.
Facebook said it is ending an ad-targeting option called Partner
Categories that lets such data brokers target specific groups of
Facebook users -- people who buy a certain product, for example --
on behalf of their ad clients. Facebook believes shutting that
system down "will help improve people's privacy on Facebook,"
Graham Mudd, product marketing director at Facebook, said in a post
Wednesday.
In addition, Facebook is halting its practice of providing
anonymized data from its platform to such information brokers that
they use to measure the effectiveness of their ad campaigns, said
people familiar with the matter.
Facebook is making the changes as part of a broader review of
how it handles user information. The company is reviewing its
relationship with data brokers in part because it is concerned
about how those firms are obtaining their data and how accurate it
is, one of the people said.
Representatives for Acxiom and Datalogix didn't immediately
respond to request for comment.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 28, 2018 19:20 ET (23:20 GMT)
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