ACXM Acxiom Holdngs (delisted)

By Deepa Seetharaman, Georgia Wells and Suzanna Vranica 

Facebook Inc. is curbing the information that it exchanges with companies that collect and sell consumer data for advertisers, as the social-media giant tries to calm an uproar over its handling of personal information.

The measures, part of which Facebook announced late Wednesday, affect a group of so-called data brokers such as Acxiom Corp. and Oracle Corp.'s DataLogix unit that gather shopping and other information on consumers that Facebook for years has incorporated into the ad-targeting system that is at the core of its business.

Facebook said it is ending an ad-targeting option called Partner Categories that lets such data brokers target specific groups of Facebook users -- people who buy a certain product, for example -- on behalf of their ad clients. Facebook believes shutting that system down "will help improve people's privacy on Facebook," Graham Mudd, product marketing director at Facebook, said in a post Wednesday.

In addition, Facebook is halting its practice of providing anonymized data from its platform to such information brokers that they use to measure the effectiveness of their ad campaigns, said people familiar with the matter.

Facebook is making the changes as part of a broader review of how it handles user information. The company is reviewing its relationship with data brokers in part because it is concerned about how those firms are obtaining their data and how accurate it is, one of the people said.

Representatives for Acxiom and Datalogix didn't immediately respond to request for comment.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 28, 2018 19:20 ET (23:20 GMT)

Acxiom (NASDAQ:ACXM)
Historical Stock Chart
From Jun 2024 to Jul 2024

Acxiom (NASDAQ:ACXM)
Historical Stock Chart
From Jul 2023 to Jul 2024