Facebook Challenges Google With Product Ads

Facebook Tuesday launched a competitor to Google’s Shopping advertising service, allowing marketers to show users some or all of their product catalogs. With Product Ads, Facebook is challenging one of Google’s most successful new businesses in recent years. Originally called product-listing ads, Google started offering the ads, which typically include pictures and prices, in 2012 to compete with Amazon.com . Google displays the ads based on a user’s search for products. Facebook said in a blog post it would show product ads, also with pictures and prices, to Facebook users who visited the advertiser’s website or mobile app, or based on a user’s interests or location. The move is Facebook’s latest effort to elbow in on a lucrative and growing part of Google’s turf. Retailer spending on Google Shopping ads surged 47% in the fourth quarter, compared with the same period of 2013, according to Adobe . That was almost eight times the growth rate of retailer spending on Google’s traditional keyword-based search ads, Adobe noted. Advertisers have been able to piece together product ads for Facebook for a while, but it was complicated and few retailers did it. The new service automates the process, helps advertisers make the ads more relevant and places them on Facebook’s mobile news feed, which wasn’t possible before, according to Matt Ackley, chief marketing officer of ad technology company Marin Software . “It’s more targeted on mobile and it’s easier to do the targeting,” Ackley said. “The more targeted social media becomes the more of a threat it is to Google.” A Google spokesman did not immediately return a request for comment. Facebook collects information on the websites Facebook users have visited, including product pages of retail sites. The new Product Ads can use this data to help retailers target ads to those people on Facebook, a technique known as re-targeting. “The re-targeting and mobile aspects of this are critical for retailers,” said David Spitz, chief operating officer at ChannelAdvisor , which helps more than 1,000 merchants sell and market products through online marketplaces and websites including Amazon.com and Google Shopping. ChannelAdvisor is supporting Facebook’s Product Ads. Spitz said ChannelAdvisor can adapt the product feeds that it sends to Google Shopping for Facebook Product Ads, without additional work by retailers. “We see Facebook as a meaningful potential source of demand,” Spitz said. ______________________________________________________ For the latest news and analysis, Get breaking news and personal-tech reviews delivered right to your inbox. More from WSJ.D: And make sure to visit WSJ.D for all of our news, personal tech coverage, analysis and more, and add our XML feed to your favorite reader.


War on the data beasts: don’t let Google, Facebook et al control your digital lives

‘Large corporations have wrapped their tentacles around the world, extracting private data from where they land and appropriating all its value for their own coffers’ Once it was money that made the world go round – now it is data. Big data itself is neutral and passive, but when harnessed it can fuel technical innovation, further our understanding of the universe and even save lives. But for every positive there is a negative. Enter the DatenKraken. The Kraken was a mythological monster of old that ruled northern European seas, striking fear into the hearts of even the hardiest of sailors. Its monstrous tentacles were so precise that they could pluck a lone sailor from the deck and yet so powerful that they could pull a whole ship down to the seabed. Similarly the DatenKraken, a term courtesy of Germany, is used to describe large ‘Surveillance Valley’ corporations that terrorise the ocean of information on the internet. Large corporations such as Google, Facebook and Amazon have wrapped their tentacles around the world, extracting private data from where they land and appropriating all its value for their own coffers. >See also: Consumers call for a privacy charter to protect their personal data online The immense glut of data that we all now generate through our online and offline activities provides the beasts with a tremendous feast. It’s perhaps no surprise that the connection between mass data harvesting and sea monsters was made in Germany, where suspicion of data collection and exploitation is nothing new. Looking back at recent German history, it is easy to see that a legacy of domineering observation has had an impact on modern German attitudes towards data collection and why they are so different to the rest of Europe and even America. During the Third Reich there was the Gestapo and the active encouragement of spying on fellow countrymen. Following the war, in East Germany, the Stasi infiltrated society, gathering personal information and creating deep-seated feelings of mistrust and suspicion towards the wholesale collection of the data of unsuspecting people. Fast forward to the present day and there are numerous incidents that point towards the difficult relationship between Germany and the modern data collectors such as Google. The Street View mapping project, for example, ran into many obstacles over privacy concerns and was eventually abandoned. What the DatenKraken are doing is stealing the control over our digital lives. They have become such a large part of modernity and have secured a firm place in our future that a life without them has become almost inescapable. Every piece of information we hand over to Facebook becomes property it may use in any way it sees fit. Every move we make on the web is traced by trackers. Cookies and the log data that we create by just being there – our ‘data exhaust’ – generates even more interesting data than the things we post willingly. Personal data is not being used passively, but is instead being analysed and used against us. Facebook has gone so far as experimenting with ‘emotional contagion’ to manipulate user’s moods. Google has even suggested that 100,000 lives could be saved by ‘mining’ our health data. Can we really trust a company that’s business model is to ruthlessly monetise data with this kind of information? A Big Brother-style world was once the thing of Orwell’s nightmares, but it could all too soon dominate our future should we try to resist. Champions of an open, transparent digital world – like Tim Berners-Lee and Aral Balkan – are building alternative systems to allow people greater control of their data. But until these systems are in place, the best way to regain some control is to reduce our reliance on these data-hungry services. However, none of us can be expected to live in a digital cave. We still need to communicate, but what’s the alternative? Being prepared to pay for online services is usually a good start, and open-source software can provide some interesting solutions. Open source products are built with visibility and transparency at the core. You can use this software safe in the knowledge that your data isn’t being syphoned off to be stored or manipulated. >See also: Personal privacy, internet commerce and national security: can they co-exist? Another step you can take to enjoy an unrestricted and privacy-respecting internet is to encrypt your data. Encryption is the single easiest step you can take to keep information private and stop others taking advantage of it. The large companies are coming under more and more public scrutiny and internet concerns have sparked large debates that span across legal and moral themes. People are becoming attentive, discovering the wider implications and taking up arms against the devourers of data. We have the ability to take ownership and hold these large organisations accountable for what they are doing. By not feeding the beasts we can create a data utopia. Sourced from Rafael Laguna, Open-Xchange


Facebook asks companies to share information on cyber threats

Facebook has created a test platform for companies to share data about cyberattacks and improve communication among security teams, the company said this week. The new site, called ThreatExchange, is based on Facebook’s internal software to catalog and understand threats, known as ThreatData. “Threat Exchange is a platform created by Facebook that enables security professionals anywhere to share threat information more easily, learn from each other’s discoveries, and make their own systems safer,” the company said. Facebook said the platform also has privacy controls “so that participants can help protect any sensitive data by specifying who can see the threat information they contribute.” The privacy concern is one reason that companies have been reluctant to work together in the past and share information about their vulnerabilities. Facebook said it was trying to encourage collaboration through ThreatExchange, citing an example from a year ago when the company’s services were attacked by a botnet. The company teamed with other technology companies to get a clearer picture about the nature of the attack. “We quickly learned that sharing with one another was key to beating the botnet because parts of it were hosted on our respective services and none of us had the complete picture,” Mark Hammell, Facebook’s manager of threat infrastructure, wrote in a blog post. “During our discussions, it became clear that what we needed was a better model for threat sharing,” he wrote. Early adopters of the system included Twitter, Bitly, Dropbox, Tumblr and Yahoo. Amrita Jayakumar covers IT and federal government contracting for Capital Business, The Post's local business section.