Facebook Cuts Ties With Data Brokers Which Helped Market Data To Advertisers

After facing a global backlash for letting companies walk away with private data of people on Facebook, the social media company said it has ended its partnerships with data brokers that use personal information of users in order to target them and send them advertisements.

The social networking website has made some changes which includes implementation of new privacy tools that will let users delete their data forever, Skynews reported. A product marketing director at Facebook said this would take over six months and would help improve Facebook’s privacy.

After this announcement of Facebook cutting ties with various data brokers, shares in Facebook may plummet further. Since mid-March its shares are more than 17% down. Acxiom and Experian, data and technology marketing companies, were collecting data of people from Facebook and advertisers used them to get information and target people.

Cambridge Analytica, a UK-based communications firm violated a term with Facebook which says, such data couldn’t be marketed or sold, but also that Facebook did not have any measure to control such an act in this system. In the Cambridge Analytica scandal it has come out that the firm was hired by Donald Trump's presidential campaign team and they illegally harvested information from 50 million Facebook users. They also procured their data from a psychology professor at the University of Cambridge, Aleksandr Kogan.

He told the Guardian that he collected user data from Facebook “for academic purposes” . Some Facebook users agreed to give their information to Kogan’s app, but apaarently he also got permission to harvest data on all their Facebook friends, Mint reported.

Frederike Kaltheuner, founder of Privacy International's Data Exploitation programme explains that collecting data and creating psymetric profile are the same as knowing users’ interests or future behaviour, it is a field which does much. It build a profile of the user which was not possible before this in any research methods, by this one can know how neurotic you are, how open you are to new experiences or whether you are contentious. And so on, Mint reported.