Two companies, HasOffers and Kontagent, have violated the Facebook agreements regarding how long they may hold onto data, and now they are paying the price. They have been cut from the Facebook mobile ad measurement program.
Facebook discovered the violation during a routine privacy audit of their mobile marketing partners, which was conducted by a third party auditor. They did an onsite audit of each of the partners, to ensure they were honoring the contracts.
The following statement from Facebook sheds some additional light on the issue. “After working with a third-party auditor to review the practices of all our mobile measurement partners, we discovered that some weren’t adhering to the terms they agreed to. As a result, we’ve removed a couple of our partners from the program. We take our contracts seriously, and will continue to act swiftly anytime we find out they are being violated.”
The limitations on how long these partners can keep the data is a move by Facebook to help ensure companies can’t take the data and reference it against other databases to identify the actual users. Currently, the data provided by Facebook is all anonymous. If companies were able to keep this data for extended periods of time, they could cross reference things like Apple’s Identifier for Advertising, to pinpoint who the Facebook users are, and create another side-database for marketing and advertising.
It is important to note that the auditors did not discover any indication that this was being done.
As marketers, it is important to understand that when working on agreements with Facebook, or any other company, it is your responsibility to follow the terms of the agreement. Violating the terms, even unintentionally, can have serious repercussions for your entire business.
HasOffers CEO said in a statement on their blog, “I want to be clear that we did not violate any privacy regulations, and there was no data leakage or inappropriate data provided to advertisers. This has been confirmed by Facebook. We first disclosed all of our data storage and deletion processes with Facebook during an audit in September. We sought clarification on certain issues and offered solutions to allow our products to work within Facebook’s terms. We believed we were working collaboratively with Facebook to comply with their requests. Regardless of their recent and sudden decision, we remain hopeful and open to working with Facebook in the future.”
