…Facebook starts tracking non-users around the internet
Facebook has gotten bigger nets to fish non-users. If it is just one man on earth that is not on the social network, it could still cause Mark Zuckerberg sleepless nights. So far Facebook has embarked on a massive social evangelism hoping to win as many souls as possible to the fold. As this evangelism is taking a more military “never let go” approach as Facebook is now chasing heavily after non-users with advertisements to come onboard Facebook.
It is now official that Facebook will display ads to web users who happen not to be members of its social network. The company made the announcement, voicing its ambitious plans of yet engineering a further expansion of its online ad network.
Going by reports from The Wall Street Journal reports, Facebook will now employ cookies, “like” buttons, as well as other plug-ins integrated on third-party sites. This will take on the task of tracking members even non-members alike. The company asserted that it now has the sufficient capacity to target non-Facebook users even up to serving well-aimed advertisements at them.
This to me has this aggressive tone to it. Even Facebook practices have aroused regulators in Europe questioning Facebook as to privacy concerns. This had forced Facebook had begun the practice of displaying a banner notification which appears at the top of its News Feed for users especially in Europe, drawing their notice to its use of cookies as deemed fit by an EU directive.
“Publishers and app developers have some users who aren’t Facebook users,” Andrew Bosworth, vice president of Facebook’s ads and business platform, tells the Journal. “We think we can do a better job powering those ads.”
Targeted advertising is now a selling habit across the internet, but Facebook maintains strong belief that it could more efficiently kick at non-members via means of the vast amounts of data it already has accumulated on the close to 1.7 billion people who make use of the site.
The company says it can employ this judicious quantity of data for the purpose of inferences as to the behavioral personality of non-members. This approach could be termed “lookalike” targeting. “Because we have a core audience of over a billion people [on Facebook] who we do understand, we have a greater opportunity than other companies using the same type of mechanism,” Bosworth vice president of Facebook’s ads and business platform said.
