While there has been grumbling about the lack of privacy on Facebook, from knowing every little move your friends make — and vice versa — like what you “like” and comment on, the world’s most successful social network has taken it a step further, knowing that millions of people will just go along with the flow.
Entering a partnership with Datalogix, Mark Zuckerberg‘s brainchild will now be able to track whether your purchases at CVS Pharmacy and other businesses are influenced by ad placements on Facebook and share that information with the various corporations.
CNN reports:
Datalogix has purchasing data from about 70m American households largely drawn from loyalty cards and programmes at more than 1,000 retailers, including grocers and drug stores. By matching email addresses or other identifying information associated with those 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.
The emails and other identifying information are made anonymous and collected into groups of people who saw an ad and people who did not. Datalogix compiles a report for Facebook and its advertisers to measure which creative approaches and demographic targeting persuade people to buy specific products offline.
Facebook said it is paying Datalogix for the data-matching. So far, the two companies have measured 45 campaigns and in 70 per cent of cases, for every dollar a marketer spent on Facebook it earned an additional $3 in incremental sales, said Brad Smallwood, Facebook’s head of measurement and insights.
According to the Atlanta Wire, to opt out of having your information shared almost takes an act of congress:
First, you have to find the help center, which involves first clicking help, under the home tab. Then, that will give the option to go to the help center. After clicking through to Ads and Business solutions, then to Ads and Sponsored Stories, then to Interacting with Ads, you will finally see a list of questions about ads as it effects you. Way down at the very bottom (pictured below), where it says “learn more about the partners and choices they offer” is a link to Datalogix, which leads to this page, where about half-way down under “choice” there is an opt-out link. That is a lot of clicking. To avoid all that, you can just click here to get to that Datalogix page, or here to opt-out.
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