Facebook on Wednesday officially announced its partnership with Acxiom Corp. of Little Rock and several other data miners. The social media giant said the partnerships are part of an effort to improve its custom audiences tool.
The partnership was previously reported by AdAge. According to Facebook's news release, marketers will be able take advantage of the data refining techniques performed at Acxiom and elsewhere.
"For example, an auto dealer may want to customize an offer to people who are likely to be in the market for a new car," the release notes. "To do this many businesses work with third party companies to better understand who might be in the market for a new car."
Facebook claims that the marketing efforts won't compromise user privacy.
"This process is specifically designed so that we don’t share private information about individuals with marketers. People will still have the same control over the ads they see on Facebook," a report on Facebook Studio notes. "They can learn more about the ads they see, give feedback, or opt-out using the controls we provide in the ads themselves or in the Help Center."
Acxiom also said the security of the data used in the program "meets industry best practices." A spokeswoman said in an email that nobody between Facebook, advertisers or data miners actually gets more information as a result of this type of targeting.
"Third parties can't append Facebook's data to information it has about consumers and vice versa," the email stated.
Other data miners are involved in the partnership including Datalogix, Epsilon and BlueKai.
