Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist and a senior policy analyst at American Civil Liberties Union, recently told TOI that “web users’ privacy is sacrificed at the altar of behavioural advertising and profits returned to shareholders.”
NEW DELHI: Facebook is using the services of Datalogix, a US-based data-mining company that collects and analyses information about shoppers from brick-and-mortar stores, to gauge how many of its users make buying decisions based on the advertisements served on the social networking site.
The move, seen to be Facebook's response to the growing pressure to prove its efficacy as an advertising platform, raises concerns among privacy advocates who wonder whether using Datalogix violates Facebook's $9.5 million settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission over privacy practices. The settlement requires the social networking site to make it clear to users when it shares their information beyond what their privacy settings mandate, operate a programme to protect users' privacy and get users' approval before sharing their information.
"By matching email addresses or other identifying information associated with loyalty cards against emails or information used to establish Facebook accounts, Datalogix can track whether people bought a product in a store after seeing an ad on Facebook," Financial Times, London, reported on its website.
Brad Smallwood, head of measurement and insights at Facebook, admitted that the company was under pressure from marketers and defended the arrangement with Datalogix. "We kept hearing back (from marketers) that we needed to push further and help them do a better job," he told the London newspaper.
According to the report, Facebook has purchased data on 70 million US households from Datalogix, which culls information from loyalty cards and programmes from more than 1,000 retailers. Facebook users are automatically included in the advertising studies conducted with Datalogix, and cannot opt out through their Facebook account, the report said. Both Facebook and Datalogix told the London newspaper that the purchasing data of individuals was not shared with Facebook or its advertisers.
The news comes close on the heels of a poll by Reuters/Ipsos in June which found that a majority of Facebook users did not factor in the advertisements on the website while making their buying decisions. The poll showed that four out of five Facebook users were neither influenced by the advertisements nor by the comments on their profile pages while making a purchase.
Last month, Facebook allowed brands using the site to target users through their email IDs and phone numbers. This means that if a Facebook user has supplied an email ID while shopping at a shoe store, the shoe manufacturer may use this ID to reach him on Facebook even if he has not visited the Facebook page of that company.
On its website, Datalogix boasts its data "includes almost every US household and more than $1 trillion in consumer transactions." It adds: "Nobody is better positioned to deliver the right message to the right audience across channels."
As companies like General Motors — which decided to withdraw advertisements from Facebook in May this year — try to measure the efficacy of online advertisements, web giants like Facebook and Google are resorting to aggressive user tracking so that they can serve better and more relevant advertisements.
The tracking of web users has raised serious privacy concerns. Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist and a senior policy analyst at American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), recently told TOI that "web users' privacy is sacrificed at the altar of behavioural advertising and profits returned to shareholders".
"Companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft are not charities ... In order to serve better advertising, these companies collect and retain vast amounts of private, personal information about consumers. Privacy is destroyed as collateral damage in the race to deliver a more relevant banner ad," he said.
In 2009, Soghoian, along with two other researchers, proposed a "Do Not Track" protocol to make sure that the privacy of a user is respected on the web. If implemented, this will allow a web browser to request websites like Facebook to stop tracking the user.
"Do Not Track is an attempt to escape the existing arms race in online privacy (in which tech companies build a technology to protect users' privacy, and then the online advertising companies engineer around it)," Soghoian told TOI. "Unfortunately, the big ad companies and their partners see DNT as a threat to their very survival, and have deployed armies of lobbyists to fight it in Washington DC, Brussels and in the W3C standards body. It is unclear who will win."
Would love to here from you...