Ad Targeting and Your Privacy: Keeping you informed on ad targeting updates

Last year we introduced features that let advertisers reach their customers on Facebook with relevant ads. With each of these new features, we described how we built and designed them with people's privacy in mind, and how people using Facebook continue to have control over the ads they see. Today we announced that we're continuing to develop our advertising offerings through partnerships with approved third party partners.

As with our existing targeting tools, the process is designed so that no personal information is exchanged between Facebook and marketers (or the third parties those marketers work with). These select third party partners use hashes of customer or potential customer information to create audience groups on Facebook. (For more on this type of targeting and hashing, see here). When advertisers reach these groups of people with ads, they'll get back the same anonymous and aggregate ad reporting marketers on Facebook currently receive. As with other Facebook advertising, we don’t share private information about individuals with marketers as a part of this process.

At Facebook we work hard to be transparent about how our advertising works and to give you control over the ads you see. As with other Facebook ads, you can ask Facebook to hide a select ad or ads from a specific advertiser by providing feedback though the drop-down menu in the upper right-hand corner of the ad. In addition, you can choose to remove yourself from these select third party partners' targeting through the "About this ad" link or from the Help Center.

We recognize people place a lot of trust in us to protect the information they share on Facebook. We think carefully about how we can best honor the commitments we've made around privacy by giving people control over their information, being transparent about how we use that information, and being accountable to our users and regulators.