Yesterday, Facebook announced that it’s new mobile ad network (the one that analysts are counting on to rescue the company’s stock price) would allow advertisers to pay to use your Facebook data to target you with ads outside the Facebook environment. So, for example, if you’ve authorized Facebook on an outside mobile website, you’ll begin to see ads targeted to your Facebook profile data.

Says TechCrunch:

Starting later today, you may start seeing banner and interstitial ads targeted by your Facebook biographical and social data within non-Facebook mobile iOS and Android apps plus mobile websites where you’ve authenticated with Facebook. The targetable data includes your age, gender, location, Likes, friends who’ve used an advertiser’s app and basically any other targeting options in Facebook’s standard ads marketplace.

…today represents an important shift from Facebook utilizing its traffic to instead solely utilizing its data to monetize. There might be some small vocal minority unhappy about the repurposing of their profile data, but Facebook assures me privacy was “top of mind” when designing the new ads program and no personally identifiable information is ever shared with third parties.

In the end, people are going to see ads in other apps anyways so they might as well be relevant.

You might have guessed how we feel about Facebook using your personal profile data to target you with ads since, after all, we are an ad-free organization and are notoriously grouchy. Then again, you did give them the data, right?

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