c*********o 发帖数: 8367 | 1 Remember When Facebook Wanted Your Phone Number? It's Using It To Sell Ads
Business InsiderBy Jim Edwards | Business Insider – 3 hours ago
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Since about September, Facebook has offered its advertisers a powerful new
way to track its users as they surf the Web: It's called "phone number
retargeting." (The move comes separately to Facebook's effort earlier this
year to collect its users' mobile phone numbers to prevent security breaches
.)
More recently, according to AdExchanger, Facebook has also developed a new "
conversion pixel" — basically a type of tracking device — within ads
displayed on Facebook.
The combination of phone retargeting and conversion pixels theoretically
allows advertisers to target you directly with ads and then measure exactly
how you respond to them, whether by clicking, ignoring, or buying something
from the advertiser's site. The process is anonymous, in that advertisers
can't identify you by name. They do know, however, that they're targeting
you based on your phone number.
Some advertisers have been doing this kind of thing on other websites for
years. But most Facebook users don't know it's going on within Facebook.
The primary reason Facebook prompts users for a mobile phone number is to
prevent account hacking. Earlier this year, Facebook began asking every user
for a phone number for "security" purposes. Here's what Facebook says about
that:
Those numbers, it turns out, are NOT being sold to advertisers.*
Rather, Facebook also collects users' phone numbers when they are entered in
other parts of a users' account information. Those numbers are then made
available to advertisers as part of its new Custom Audience targeting
product. "Audiences can be defined by either user email address, Facebook
UIDs, or user phone numbers," the product states.
Here's how it works: Let's say you are a member of your local gym. You
probably gave the gym your phone number. But then you let your membership
lapse, and now the gym wants to persuade you to come back. The gym can cross
-reference its list of members' phone numbers with users' phone numbers on
Facebook, and serve an ad on the page of any user with a matching number.
Suddenly, you're seeing ads that say, "Get 10% off if you rejoin your local
gym!"
Advertisers can combine such a campaign with ads that carry a conversion
pixel, which will enable a "cookie" to track what you do so that the gym can
see how successful its campaign was.
There's a level of privacy built in to the system: Although your phone
number will be targeted by ads, the number will be "hashed," meaning that
the system disguises it by replacing it with random code, making you
anonymous. So the gym might target 100 phone numbers, but it won't know
which of those specific people actually responded to the ad (until they pay
for a membership online, of course). All the gym will know is that a certain
number responded to the ad, and that those users must have been on the
original phone list.
*Correction: This item originally said, incorrectly, that security phone
numbers were used for advertiser retargeting. The company tells us that
these numbers are kept separate and NOT used for that purpose.
Disclosure: The author owns Facebook stock. |
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