Facebook finally opens its data firehose to select advertisers
Facebook finally opens its data firehose to select advertisers
By Rex Santus
May 12, 2015
Until now, Facebook has been wary of doling out big data to advertisers. It’s a practice long used by Twitter — a company that has profited immensely from it.
But now, the social media giant is finally making its firehose available to a select group through Topic Data, a new analytics tool developed with DataSift, an analytics company.
For now, To pic Data will only be available in the U.S. and U.K. to a “limited number of DataSift’s partners.” All of the partners will be Facebook-approved.
Facebook emphasizes, of course, that this is totally privacy-friendly. It will also only be used for general insights, not targeted ads.
“We are not disclosing personally identifying information to anyone, including our partners and marketers,”
reads a blog post announcing the tool. “And, the results delivered to marketers are analyses and interpretations of the information, not actual topic data.”
The data is anonymous and aggregated, according to DataSift. All traces of user identity are removed from the analyses, and results are only used if they include data from 100 more Facebook users.
Still, this does mean Facebook is scanning and aggregating your status updates to distribute information to brands — and so far, there’s no way to opt out.
