Facebook Will Sell Users' Data to Serve Ads on Sites Across the Web

[phaZed]

Source: NBC News

Facebook is now selling marketers ads that will appear all over the web, not just on the social network, the company announced Sunday. It will offer advertisers Facebook data to help them target customers, and also track whether the ads lead to sales.

It's Facebook's push to become a web-wide ad platform like Google, and the company is doing so through a relaunch of the "Atlas" network that Facebook bought from Microsoft for an undisclosed sum in February 2013. The new methods are designed to address the fact that desktop ad-tracking "cookies" don't offer demographic information like age or gender, don't work on mobile and can't follow users across web browsers or devices, Erik Johnson, the head of Atlas, said in a blog post. Atlas, he wrote, is dedicated to "targeting, serving and measuring across devices" -- with the data users share on Facebook served up as the icing on the cake.

Read more: http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-...users-data-serve-ads-sites-across-web-n214026

 

[ohio_grad_06]

Great. I know my mom has friends at the college she works at who've traveled overseas to Europe and places(I'm from the US). Anyway, I guess that one of them claimed to have seen another's picture on a billboard advertising some product, apparently pulled from a social network. Makes you wonder what kind of rights they get to your data when you get those free services. People have no idea.