Facebook's decision to stop working with third-party data collectors might earn it public-relations points, but it does little to protect your privacy. Limiting its partnership with data brokers also doesn't touch on the difficulty Facebook has had keeping your data out of the hands of other companies. The information includes categories like home ownership and purchase history and comes from some of the world's largest data brokers, including Acxiom, Epsilon and Experian. These data brokers have troves of data on credit scores, family status, pet ownership and hobbies, which they glean from surveys, warrantee cards, retail loyalty programs and other sources. And even without direct access to the brokers' data, Facebook was already able to build prediction models based on it, said Kenneth Sanford, lead analytics architect at the data science company Dataiku.

Source: ABC News March 29, 2018 20:44 UTC