Surrounded by all the news, Facebook is trying to gain back the trust it lost in the last few days. Recently, Facebook launched new features such as Access My Information and changed its settings menu for the users to see what details Facebook access. Yesterday, Facebook announced that it is cutting off ties with third-party data providers for targetting people through its ads. Back in 2013, Facebook started a feature – Partner Categories wherein it partnered with major data providers for targetting people more relevant for its ads network. Facebook used to get data through Experian and Acxiom which it then provided to advertisers for ads targetting. Facebook also confirmed that these changes were permanent and it is not going to partner again with third-party data providers. They took this step in order to protect user’s privacy from getting leaked out to advertisers. Facebook used data which they collected from their own users (such as, the type of page a user likes), data from third-party providers and from its advertisers. Omitting the third-party source will be a loss for Facebook but taking steps to protect users privacy might be a better sign for the company in order to gain the trust of its customers back.
The product marketing director of the company, Graham Mudd said in a statement regarding this decision that – “We want the advertisers to know that we are shutting down the Partner Categories program started in 2013. This product helped third-party data providers to target people directly on Facebook itself. This might be a common industry practice but we are focusing on taking this decision and shutting it down in the next six months as this will help improve people’s privacy who are on Facebook”. But, even if this decision was made earlier it would not have affected the outcome of Cambridge Analytica scandal as it took data of 50 million users without their permission.
Egan and Beringer wrote that “We were working on most of these updates for a long time but due to events which occurred in the last few days, the importance of these decisions have increased quite a lot”. Facebook stated that they will still be working on with data-providers companies like Experian and Acxiom to measure the performance of its ads and providing metrics related to it but will also be conducting a survey regarding their relationships with these companies. Facebook might also be planning towards making a change regarding sharing data in a shared environment in order to increase privacy for its users.
All these moves by Facebook in recent days might be due to the backslash it faced from users and investors but it might be towards the better direction too. Protecting the privacy of its customers should be the prime aim of any companies and these turn of events must have put a lot of pressure on all the tech companies to take their role more seriously and protect their user’s privacy.
