Bloomberg News
Facebook Inc. is curbing the information that it exchanges with companies that collect and sell consumer data for advertisers, as the social-media giant tries to calm an uproar over its handling of personal information.
The measures, part of which Facebook FB, +0.53% announced late Wednesday, affect a group of so-called data brokers such as Acxiom Corp. ACXM, -8.42% and Oracle Corp.’s ORCL, -0.88% DataLogix unit that gather shopping and other information on consumers that Facebook for years has incorporated into the ad-targeting system that is at the core of its business.
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Facebook said it is ending an ad-targeting option called Partner Categories that lets such data brokers target specific groups of Facebook users — people who buy a certain product, for example — on behalf of their ad clients. Facebook believes shutting that system down “will help improve people’s privacy on Facebook,” Graham Mudd, product marketing director at Facebook, said in a post Wednesday.
In addition, Facebook is halting its practice of providing anonymized data from its platform to such information brokers that they use to measure the effectiveness of their ad campaigns, said people familiar with the matter.
An expanded version of this report appears on WSJ.com.
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