Facebook personalizes advertising with new terms and conditions
Since Friday, anyone who registers with Facebook automatically agrees to the new General Terms and Conditions (GTC). The social network wants to use this to tailor advertisements even more specifically to users.
Facebook earned 3.59 billion dollars from advertising in the first quarter alone. That is an increase of 53 percent. Meanwhile, the company is also earning a lot of money from advertising displayed on tablets and smartphones. Ads on mobile devices recently brought in 69 percent of all advertising revenue.
With figures like these, it is not surprising that Facebook wants to further optimize its advertising business. The new terms and conditions are intended to tailor advertising more closely to individual users. For example, information about pages visited and apps used outside of Facebook will also be evaluated.
Those who do not want this can deactivate personalized advertising, explains Facebook. The company also promises to use the changes to make its data and terms of use clearer and easier to understand for users. In future, members will be able to define more precisely who can view their entries. They will also be able to find out why they are being shown certain advertisements.
Nevertheless, the new rules have met with fierce criticism from data protectionists, who are talking about a lack of transparency. In particular, it is not clear whether Facebook also creates precise user profiles when evaluating data. In addition, the terms and conditions do not explicitly state that no data is exchanged with the WhatsApp text messaging service.
Information about the surroundings
At the same time, Facebook wants to provide its users with information about their immediate surroundings in future. Over the next few weeks, the new "Place Tips" function will be tested, which can display "entertaining, useful and important information" to Facebook smartphone users. To do this, "Place Tips" determines the user's location and displays information about the surrounding area in the Facebook app. Among other things, the new function will display comments and photos from other users as well as demonstrations that are called for on Facebook.
The function is currently only available for iPhones. If you want to use it, you must agree to Facebook determining your location via the mobile or Wi-Fi network. However, this will not be visible to other users. The function is initially being tested in particularly busy places in the New York metropolis, such as Central Park and Times Square.
With the new function, Facebook is attacking providers such as Yelp, on whose pages users can rate restaurants and service providers, for example. Yelp is active in 29 countries. (SDA)
