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Wolfie Christl @WolfieChristl
, 14 tweets, 6 min read Read on Twitter
1/ So, Facebook *itself* will stop sorting+classifying users also based on extensive info from third-party data brokers such as Acxiom, Oracle, Experian and Epsilon. Great, because it shows that they cannot do whatever they want anymore. But.

[thread]

adage.com/article/digita…
2/ Businesses will still be able to use extensive info about our behaviors off Facebook from third-party data brokers and myriads of other sources to target people in FB. But they have to do the sorting+classifying by themselves and then upload the results via "Custom Audiences'.
3/ So, this is a quite smart move. They can tell the public things like 'we cut off data brokers', but in fact they are just trying to shift the responsibility for linking third-party data to FB user profile data more to the third-parties.
4/ Like "whatever customer and real-time behavioral data other businesses upload via Custom Audiences, we're just a neutral platform, we're not responsible for which (personal) data they aggregate, collate and upload to Facebook".

We shouldn't let them get away with this.
5/ And of course they won't 'cut ties' with data brokers. They 'will still work with third-party brokers for measurement purposes, including measuring offline behavior as Facebook does through a partnership with Oracle’s Datalogix', e.g. to track purchases adexchanger.com/platforms/face…
6/ Taken together, as @roofjoke summarized it ():

Businesses will have to purchase extra data about income, net worth, purchases, vehicles owned, banking and insurance policies, number+age of children etc by themselves, before they can use it on Facebook.
7/ And btw. this is *really* interesting. It is widely known that FB uses extra data from data brokers for profiling+targeting, BUT. Which kinds of data does FB provide to data brokers? Does 'anonymized' mean aggregated? Or individual-level/pseudonymized? wsj.com/articles/faceb…
8/ What reasons, other than current public debate, could have affected Facebook's decision to shut down "partner categories"?

a) Is the third-party data provided to Facebook by data brokers perhaps not as 'clean' and 'permissioned' as these companies claim it to be?
9/

b) Doesn't seem that the GDPR is the main reason ('over the next six months'). However, we've seen & will further see efforts to shift liabilities because of the GDPR. This is not necessarily bad, because it formalizes accountability, but absolutely needs further scrutiny.
10/ The real issue is 'Custom Audiences' which lets businesses systematically link customer data with FB data. Google & others provide similar mechanisms. It's kind of "list broking on steroids" + often used illegally in the EU. I wrote about it here, p47: crackedlabs.org/dl/CrackedLabs…
11/ 'Partner Categories' is "just reselling Experian or Acxiom ... something those companies could always enable on their end ... I suspect this is a combination of those segments not getting much adoption, plus scoring some easy privacy brownie points"
12/ I wouldn't say it would be 'the end of the world', but yeah:

"So long as Custom Audiences is still there, the magic will still happen. If that closes, yes, it's kind of the end of the world"
13/ TechCrunch's @JoshConstine asking the same question (like I did above):
14/ Perhaps the removal of 3rd-party 'partner categories' is a bit more related to the GDPR/DSGVO than I thought. According to the German FB marketer @thomashutter they sent a timetable to advertisers that points to May 25 (screenshot is Google Translate): thomashutter.com/index.php/2018…
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