By now you’ve most likely heard of the Cambridge Analytica data breach from Facebook. For those who haven’t, it was determined that since 2014 the political consulting firm collected personally identifiable information from about 87 million Facebook users, gained through Facebook’s “This Is Your Digital Life” app. The data was allegedly used to attempt to influence voter opinion on behalf of politicians who hired them.
Since this story was brought to light, Facebook has alerted account owners when they logged in if their data was compromised and has released a new privacy tool. This new Facebook feature is a section that appears at the top of the News Feed called “Protecting Your Information”. It provides a link that brings you to the “Apps and Websites” section of Facebook’s settings. This is where you can adjust your settings to remove apps you don’t want to share data with anymore, as well as see all of the apps you have previously logged into.
In addition to releasing a new privacy tool, Facebook made changes to its ad policies. The changes include required authorization and labeling of political and “issue” ads, and manager verification for large Pages. The company will also roll out a searchable political ads archive and a tool to see what ads a Page is serving.
Due to Facebook’s ad policy updates, a number of advertisers have reported many of their ads that were previously approved by Facebook prior to the Cambridge Analytica situation have come back with a notification that they were no longer allowed per Facebook’s ad policies. It is recommended that you familiarize yourself with these new ad policies to avoid this from happening to your brand’s future ads.
Facebook also dropped many third-party data providers, and demographics in response to Cambridge Analytica’s bad practices. However, with Facebook, there are so many options to target people on the platform. If those are reduced slightly, it does not eliminate the value. There is always remarketing, and other great targeting abilities available through Facebook.
As long as users continue to scroll through their Facebook feeds, it should be business as usual for advertisers. There’s no reason for a brand not to continue investing in a platform that delivers its primary advertising objectives: an extensive reach combined with comprehensive targeting and solid return on ad spend.
If you have any questions, please reach out to the experts at MoreVisibility for assistance.