Facebook Cuts Off Big Data Firms But Their Intentions Seem Less Than Pure

I've been doing a lot of reading recently into data collection, microtargeting and related subjects. My goal is to post an OP in coming days to introduce readers to the bigger players and the basics of the Marketing Technology Stack, with a focus on political advertising.

The upshot is I've been spending a lot of time in a browser, web searching companies in the industry. That's how I know that Acxiom, a company most people have never heard of is, is by market value, the world's largest broker of data about well... people. I was tempted to say "consumer data" but it's so much more than that.

In this case, it's the public backlash over abuses of social media users' data, used in political campaigning, that has people talking. The two companies most in the headlines are Cambridge Analytica and Facebook and with all eyes on Zuckerberg et al and stock prices down about $30 a share from recent highs, it's not surprisingly that Facebook is in cover-its-ass mode, scrambling to announce changes to protect users' data.

But something should be made perfectly clear right from the start. Facebook's business model is built entirely on using data about its users for targeted advertising and the same is true of Google (between the two, they control something like 87% of digital advertising). Facebook simply cannot continue to exist as it does without selling targeted advertising.

Now back to Acxiom. On March 28th, Facebook announced that it was shutting down Partner Categories. What is Partner Categories?

When creating an ad set, you may notice that some "Detailed Targeting" options are referred to as "Partners Categories" in the "Source" section of their listing.

Partner Categories are based on information provided by Facebook Marketing Partners with the Audience Data Provider specialty. These categories allow you to further refine your targeting based on information compiled by these partners, such as offline demographic and behavioral information like homeownership or purchase history. For businesses that don't have access to customer data of their own to create Custom Audiences, Partner Categories may be a good option.

Partner Categories are available to people targeting audiences located in the United States, Brazil, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Japan. Note that names of Partner Categories may be displayed in their country's language. Additional Partner Categories may become available under More Categories by submitting a request to Audience Data Providers through the appropriate partner hotlines:

The list of "Audience Data Provider" partners is a concise Who's Who of industry leaders, including Acxiom, Experian PLC, Epsilon and Oracle Data Cloud (formerly Datalogix). Essentially, what Partner Categories does is allow ad buyers to use the non-Facebook data from these companies in conjunction with Facebook user data to target users for advertising.

On its face, this may seem like Facebook taking positive action for its users but is it really? To me, it absolutely reeks of an opportunistic Facebook using a crisis it created as an opportunity to cut out the middle-men and in the long term, rake in even more money.

- While I would never promote any of these companies, they have practically nothing to do with Facebook's data collection. These data brokers allowed clients to bring data INTO Facebook from outside sources.

- They had nothing to do with what started Facebook's woes, the revelation that SCL/CA abused Facebook's lax privacy model to surreptitiously scrape data on tens of millions of users.

- Facebook has absolutely no intention of taking a hit to advertising revenue. It's simply implausible.

They're still going to be collecting all the same data (barring other changes) and using it to model and profile users for targeted advertising. Only now, unless they bow to pressure to reverse course before they phase it out Partner Categories, they'll just get a bigger piece of an ever growing pie.

a reply to: theantediluvian

I can't wait to read your future post.

It reminds me of how Outbound call centers buy people's phone numbers.

a reply to: theantediluvian

Um, you're not supposed to be rocking the boat.



DIG!

Its fascinating that there's even that much money floating around to somehow pay all this stuff and people actually make money. One must wonder how much just goes down the drain all in the name of Social Engineering....

To hell with facebook.
Worst waste of time I can think of right off.
I'd rather whittle wood with my pocket-knife.

There was sooo much money to be made with ads in the late 90s / early 2000s. And they were most often just random but somehow related to the theme the website handled.

You got something like 0.14DM for a single click. That translates roughly to 0.07 € per click and around 0.07€ per 1000 view.

Got people to make my website their startpage by providing quality content. Amazon / BOL where in their starting shoes, I do not even remember the ad-provider anymore. Made around 60-140 DM (30-70€) a week by doing nothing after the website was setup. (Edit: To be honest, I updated the linklist out of fun now and then, I did not consider it work.)

It was a linklist collection. There was no google back then. altavista/fireball and how they were called.

Today´s scheme is just big data collection, not the idea of selling a product. Your data is the product and you´re just lured in by the ad to add some tag to your digital profile.

I've always looked as the public shaming of facebook being used to take the heat off of the massive spy crap that isn't self-induced like facebook.

Speakers listening in houses, TV's that watch you, phones that have a laundry list of bio-metric sensors packed into them.

The flow of information is power, why wouldn't the agencies just register a few corporation names and call it advertising?

The gov would step in and stop it if they really were just "companies" imo.

Crazy times, probably safer to just cut the cord, at this point.

Good topic Anti

a reply to: theantediluvian

Zucker recently (Thursday iirc) repelled a 'heads will roll' meeting between him and all the big guys of FB. He was asked, in that delicate, passive-aggressive way to move along and let the business overcome the recent bad press. He declined, said his piece and the stock rose by 3% before he'd left in the car.

I agree with your perspective on it all. They will not be designing business models that make less profits. They cannot treat people's data with respect and continue to make the profit increases. What it will mean will be some public show of restraint and ethics followed by simultaneous additions to the T&Cs to continue doing what they've always done. Doing something publicly charitable is a good route. The only real difference will be the inevitable uptick in quarterly profits.

originally posted by: IgnoranceIsntBlisss
Its fascinating that there's even that much money floating around to somehow pay all this stuff and people actually make money. One must wonder how much just goes down the drain all in the name of Social Engineering....

You can be certain it's far more than the entire welfare budget and likely many many times Times more....

What matters is perception...

a reply to: theantediluvian

There is a difference between the words "cut off" and "suspends". Facebook have suspended, not cut off.

Zooks is a crook. He is anti social. He needs bringing to book because he is one of the culprits who are #ing up the West.

I wrote before here when someone was going total over the top about Zooks and the deep state. I told them it was nothing so insidious; only one thing counts: MONEY.

I really do think that Britain and America should make him answer to authority. It will send out a clear message to Google, Amazon and all the others that state comes first. If they want to be active in the West they must act like friends and not enemies. The only people these guys have been helping out so far are anti Semites, gangsters and Vlad The Impaler; anyone they can whore themselves out to. Also, they have given the same the personal details of MILLIONS AND MILLIONS OF WESTERNERS.

Zooks could be up for a spanking of the ass. Trump is at war with Amazon as it is. I hope Trump brings them down to size so they don't keep polluting our democracies and our youth and allow the invaders to plant anti Semite # in the kids' brains.

Happy Novichock ev'rybody!

love from Vlad The Impaler!

a reply to: Mandroid7
Or maybe it is a dog and pony show for our sake.

My tin foil resonance is saying that this only means that Facebook is doing a government partnership and has to let go of the usual suspects as part of the deal.

It's a claimed move to save face due to soo many leaving the site now. It's "CIA book" and that's all it's ever been, an invasive structure being built into it's grid.

originally posted by: IgnoranceIsntBlisss
Its fascinating that there's even that much money floating around to somehow pay all this stuff and people actually make money. One must wonder how much just goes down the drain all in the name of Social Engineering....

I'll bet you- it's a hell of a lot more than *money*. I'm waiting for civilization to just up and croak.

originally posted by: skunkape23
To hell with facebook.
Worst waste of time I can think of right off.
I'd rather whittle wood with my pocket-knife.

It's worse than a waste of time. They'll let people muck with you and abuse you, if you hock off the wrong groups. They are ultimate digital bullies.

a reply to: IgnoranceIsntBlisss

There's a range of estimates available online but most of them I've read recently put global spending on marketing at $500-$600 billion with a third of that spent in the US.

And what is marketing really? It's the persuasion industry. We tend to ignore it when the goal is something relatively trivial like attempting to persuade us to buy one brand of detergent over another but what about when it's things that are far more consequential like influencing who people vote for, controlling public debates on health issues, energy etc, pushing people to make poor investments with their life savings or justifying military action?

That's only one alarming aspect of the data collection.

Consider the credit reporting industry. We have laws that force credit bureaus to provide us with our credit reports and laws that force lenders to explain credit decisions based on them. The whole system is pretty f'd to begin with but imagine if those meager protections didn't exist? What if we weren't permitted to know what was in our reports and couldn't argue against mistakes?

What happens when a profile on you is used for a purpose other than marketing and its riddled with errors and you've got no way to address them and even if you could, it'd be like playing whack-a-mole because unlike three credit bureaus, there's a ton of data brokers all with their own databases.

It's a really hard topic to even delve into because it's already so much bigger than most people realize, it's constantly changing, the implications are so far reaching and in a more practical sense, the industry isn't interested in being scrutinized by the general public so they only really hint at what they're doing in most cases and the industry literature is about as jargon dense as anything I've ever encountered.

a reply to: theantediluvian

And what is marketing really? It's the persuasion industry. We tend to ignore it when the goal is something relatively trivial like attempting to persuade us to buy one brand of detergent over another but what about when it's things that are far more consequential like influencing who people vote for, controlling public debates on health issues, energy etc, pushing people to make poor investments with their life savings or justifying military action?

What a long sentence! Marketing is a PITA and it's also the driving force for much of what we enjoy. By that I mean YT/FB/Google provide services that most people choose to use because they're so damn good. I'm very quick to gripe about the assault of ever increasing adverts and the exploitation of our personal info. I hate it. I have to keep reminding myself that they also spend millions on the infrastructure and marketing is how they get paid. I'm fairly sure we can't have the internet quality without the exploitation.

It's like commercial TV and radio. *We* want good TV and radio. *They* only offer the good stuff as a means of delivering the commercials. It can't possibly continue like this without the commercials and promotions exceeding the time spent delivering content.

The last half of your epic sentence definitely strikes a chord. The analogy that springs to mind is date-rape and sexual exploitation. Strong words, I know. The thing is, *they* work on the selfish assumption that they know better. They believe persistence will always win out and the customer will have to accept it in the cold light of day. 'Get 'em drunk and have your wicked way' is the approach and screw the morality or ethics.

I also think people miss your message because of your politics. This is bigger than partisan allegiances, but shooting the messenger is inevitable rather than setting those differences aside.

a reply to: theantediluvian

Acxiom?

As in Little Rocks' Acxiom that is enmeshed with Alltel/Systematics?

Yes. I've heard of them.

Sounds like you are delving deep into the Octopus, AD.

'money... just numbers in a bank account. Please Never fix that floating point error. Now calculate 1-1 eh'

oauth authentication that's the real problem.

Lets give facebook another name and all is forgotten. ...

Come, sweet slumber
Enshroud me in thy purple cloak....