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Comment by troydavis | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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