Facebook has announced that they are shutting down access to the « Partner Categories » targeting feature for Facebook advertisers. Partner Categories is a product that allowed Facebook advertisers to directly target the social site’s users based on data provided by third-party providers, rather than from data compiled directly by Facebook.
According to a notice posted on Facebook, the Partner Categories feature will be shutting down over the next six months to help improve privacy on Facebook.
« We want to let advertisers know that we will be shutting down Partner Categories. This product enables third party data providers to offer their targeting directly on Facebook. While this is common industry practice, we believe this step, winding down over the next six months, will help improve people’s privacy on Facebook. »
With the huge amounts of data collected through Facebook analyzing the likes, posts, and comments of its users, the loss of this data should not be noticeable to most advertisers. Furthermore, Facebook advertisers will continue to be able access Facebooks monstrous data collection when targeting Facebook users, so do not think that that this will end targeted advertisements on Facebook.
According to TechCrunch, this move was made as Facebook does not feel comfortable utilizing third-party data that they were not able to collect themselves.
This is just another step for Facebook to try and reassure its users that they care about privacy after it was discovered that data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica was misusing Facebook data.
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