Facebook Begins Using Your Personal Information to Help Other Apps Advertise
A $140 billion digital advertising market: also important. (Associated Press)
Facebook is wrapping its tentacles around even more untouched corners of the digital world.
On Tuesday morning, the social media network opened the doors to its Facebook Audience Network, a community that allows most any developer or publisher to partner with Facebook in displaying mobile ads.
It works like this: Say I’m an independent developer who is starting to see a good amount of play in a game I created. Rather than spend time analyzing the little data I have on my users and seeking out advertisers who’d be interested in that demographic, I can simply download Facebook’s Audience Network software and allow it to access my app.
Facebook Audience Network, in turn, will insert ads in the form of banners, pop-ups, and sometimes even native articles into my app. But not just any ads! No, these ads use all the personal information Facebook has gathered on my game players.
Facebook is hoping to lure developers because of the unique access they have to people’s personal information — access that advertisers are willing to pay more for. So revenue goes up, Facebook takes a cut, advertisers are happy, and everyone wins.
What this means for you, however, is that the advertisements you see in the apps you use will likely get a lot more intimate. In other words, they’ll know if you’ve recently been chatting about a new pair of fall boots on the social network, and a banner ad will pop up displaying a similar, if not identical, temptation.
Ads from this network could also be displayed as “native content” in basic news apps like The Huffington Post. The Verge reports that music discovery app Shazam is also an early adopter of the system.
Though you can’t stop Facebook from using the personal information you provide in your profile, you can block it from creeping on your Web activity as you move from app to app. Check out the instructions on how to do that here.
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