Facebook is shutting down a feature that allowed “data brokers” such as Experian and Oracle to use their own reams of consumer information to target social network users, the company has announced. The feature, known as “Partner Categories”, will be “winding down over the next six months”, Facebook announced in a terse blogpost. The company says the move “will help improve people’s privacy on Facebook.”Previously, data brokers were able to target specific sets of Facebook users, letting them bring their wider ad-targeting metrics on to Facebook. Facebook is also closing down a data flow in the opposite direction, preventing the same data brokers from receiving anonymised information about how their ad campaigns have been received. The moves come after weeks of bad press for Facebook, sparked by reporting in the Observer and the Guardian that revealed Facebook’s lax oversight of data received by third parties.

Source: The Guardian March 29, 2018 09:50 UTC