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Comment by ikeboy | Hacker News Reader

Facebook is still keeping this. If the advertiser provides your info to Facebook they can target you. They are getting rid of the ability to target you based on data Facebook purchases from third parties - e.g. you buy something in a Sephora store, Facebook buys transaction info from your bank/visa/"brokers" and then tags you as "bought beauty in last 30 days", then a brand targets that tag and you see an ad you wouldn't have seen otherwise.

And yes, there's a specific Facebook targeting category for "bought beauty last 30 days", or was before this change.

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Are you sure? I can still upload my custom audience and target it? I was under they impression they blocked this feature.

Yes. First party data isnt going anywhere.

Thanks. I just updated my comment to make it clear that TechCrunch doesn't say exactly what part is being removed.

If you're correct, the part they're rolling back is relatively small.

They're removing anything they purchase from third parties. If the advertiser collects the data they can use it to target as always.

Less granular audience targeting forcing increased ad spend to reach a broader audience. FB really doesn't lose out.

If marketers make less they have less to spend. The less efficient they can be, the less they make, the lower the equilibrium bid ends up being.

Everybody has plenty of advertising channels to choose from. If FB suddenly gets more expensive to reach your target customers, the dollars will move elsewhere.

This data had a baked in 10-15% markup...so costs should actually go down for advertisers.

It is actually not that small. Facebook has a lot of info on what you like but relatively few info on what you buy offline. A lot of that data is kept by credit card/reward card companies, which then sell them to Acxiom and others (how nice of them!)

There's a huge market for grocery store purchase history from those loyalty cards everyone uses.

Which is why I don't have one of those but I make myself no illusions about the grocery company being able to track me anyway based on the bank card used to pay for the groceries.

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