Behind Facebook’s ‘very meaningful pivot’

With data collection and privacy under the microscope as never before, Facebook continues to believe in a future of personalisation in marketing, but it accepts that the way in which this happens will be different from today, and consumers will exert greater control.

What’s it doing? 

A company blog post set out the “privacy-enhancing technologies” that Facebook is working on with a view to ensuring that personalisation remains possible as the industry becomes less dependent on third-party data. Measures include multi-party computation and on-device learning.

A top executive described this as “a very meaningful pivot”, with “dedicated teams and hundreds of engineers” working on these technologies. Talking to The Verge, Graham Mudd, vp/product marketing, ads and business products at Facebook, suggested that the future would likely be “an ensemble of privacy enhancing technologies”. 

Key quote

“Because data and personalisation is at the heart of almost every one of our systems, from targeting to ad optimization to measurement, almost all our systems will be rebuilt over the next couple of years” – Graham Mudd, vp/ads & business product marketing, Facebook.

Sourced from Facebook, The Verge