With increased pressure from the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook has shut down the ability to use the Audience Insights tool to analyze Custom Audiences while they figure out a fix to a recently-discovered bug in the tool. According to a source at Facebook, after the discovery of a potential ability to exploit the use of Custom Audience reach estimates they have started updating their tools related to Custom Audiences. They are reportedly “committed to protecting the integrity of the platform and building for people first.” They are moving quickly to make sure your data is protected: analysis of Custom Audiences has been removed while they work to update their tools.
This isn’t the first time Facebook has removed reach estimates for Custom Audiences. Back in December, we saw a temporary removal of reach estimates that utilized Custom Audiences within uploaded customer data. In fact, they had recently started to roll back removal until this latest data vulnerability was discovered. This newest removal is even more far-reaching and will have increased implications for building target audiences within Facebook.
What Are Custom Audiences?
The Audience Insights tool allows marketers to analyze their advertising audiences and create psychographic audience profiles. When using Custom Audiences within Audience Insights, marketers had access to an incredibly easy-to-use tool for building target audiences.
This custom audience analysis gave us the ability to segment people who engaged with a post, visited your website, or upload a list of customer data (emails, phone numbers) and pull a ton of information on those users. This data includes everything from purchasing tendencies and demographic information to page like affiliation, psychographic profiles and more.
Bug Hunters
Northeastern professor Alan Mislove recently discovered that this tool could be easily exploited to extract personally identifiable information about individual Facebook users. He and his colleagues reported it to Facebook through their bug bounty program, prompting Facebook to shut it down completely. Mislove identified that you could infer the attributes of an individual user included within a custom audience of uploaded emails, phone numbers, etc. based on the estimated reach given within Audience Insights. While users have updated privacy settings and the ad network is meant to provide security, the professor was able to access information that should have been protected, prompting changes to the overall platform.
Impact on Marketers
While advertisers will still be able to use Custom Audiences for targeting purposes, and they’ll be able to use Audience Insights for analyzing the audience liking their page, they won’t be able to see the estimated reach or insights associated with Custom Audiences for the time being. This change will not only affect the use of Custom Audiences in Audiences Insights but will remove reach estimates and insights for Custom Audiences in: Ads Manager, Ads Manager App, Campaign Planner, Dynamic Ads, Delivery Insights, Reach and Frequency, Audience Manager, and Ads API.
For now, there are still other methods smart marketers can use to identify and create similar types of audiences. Through the use of Google Analytics and UTM tags, and A/B test targeting you can still identify psychographic traits to build your audiences and drive high-quality traffic to your site.
With the recent announcement of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Facebook stating they won’t be extending the same protections beyond the EU, there will still be some far-reaching implications that will extend past its boundaries. Time will tell what else is coming down the pike with regards to user privacy going forward.
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