Facebook rethinks its approach to privacy

The news: Facebook appears to be acknowledging that it needs to fundamentally transform how its advertising business targets consumers, per The Verge.More on this: In an exclusive interview with The Verge, Facebook’s vice president of ads and business product marketing Graham Mudd said that a “meaningful pivot” was happening around its ads business, particularly in how the ads are targeted to users. For one, “hundreds” of Facebook engineers are actively working on how to deliver highly relevant ads to users, without knowing anything specific about those underlying users.The problem: It’s no small feat, considering that this is a fundamental shift in how Facebook’s ad targeting has worked until now.“Access to [targeting] data will become more limited over the course of the next couple of years,” Mudd told The Verge. “That’s just a reflection, I think, of peoples’ changing expectations around privacy … we’re embracing and trying to build for that future.” Mudd added that Facebook believes that proactively investing in this area will allow it to “help shape that future state of the ads ecosystem.”Facebook’s acknowledgement that its advertising must change is another sign of how fundamentally digital advertising and targeting is being transformed. It’s being pushed in this direction…
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