Facebook
Inc (NASDAQ:FB) is at it again. Infringing on users’ privacy, by allowing
marketers to hunt down users by their phone numbers and bombard them with ads.
According
to Facebook it will let the marketers hunt down their prospects. But these
prospects can be hunted down only if Facebook has shared users’ personal
information with the marketers. And, of course, if the user has also shared
that information with Facebook in the first place.
Facebook
will be rolling out the targeting option widely next week. It will give
advertisers the ability to use phone numbers, email addresses and the “UID”
code that Facebook users generate when they install apps on the network.
The
idea is that advertisers hand over that data to Facebook, which will match with
the user data it already has. So, if Virgin America wants to target people who
have already flown on the airline it has to submit the data it has to Facebook.
. Both data sets are supposed to be “hashed” before they’re matched, which should
mean neither Virgin nor Facebook would actually know the identity of the people
being targeted.
Facebook
however has said that advertisers will have to seek their customers’ permission
to use the data for marketing campaigns before they proceed.
But whatever efforts the social network site is putting
in to get revenues the problem is that its revenues this
year will simply not be as high as earlier estimated, according to a new
forecast by eMarketer.
eMarketer has
predicted revenues for the company to reach $6.6 billion in 2013.
Total revenues
at Facebook will just break the $5-billion mark this year, an increase of 35.9
percent over 2011, according to the new forecast. In 2013, revenue is expected
to increase 31 percent rising in new ad products such as ad exchange.
International revenue is also expected to climb with the expansion of the
company’s mobile ad business.
In February, eMarketer predicted that Facebook’s total
revenues would surpass $6 billion this year, but after the company
underperformed market expectations in both first and second quarters eMarketer’s
forecast has been revised downward.
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