#Fail: Facebook Will Now Track What Stores You Go Into

Facebook is invasive. But now they’ve doubled down on that by rolling out a feature that will allow advertisers to see which brick and mortar stores you’ve physically walked into. These details are collected from anyone who has the location services feature of their phone turned on and allow advertisers to see in real time which Facebook ads are turning into actual sales. Here’s what Recode had to say:

Facebook on Tuesday released an ad update specific to offline shopping. Facebook advertisers can now include an interactive map displaying their physical store locations as part of a carousel ad so users can find, and maybe even visit, the actual stores.

 

Facebook will then use the phone’s location services to track how many users who saw the ad actually visited the store. Advertisers will then get that data to see if their Facebook ads attract shoppers to their brick-and-mortar stores.

The final piece is connecting these shoppers with in-store purchases, which Facebook also wants to do. A new Facebook API, called the Offline Conversions API, works with a number of in-store sales systems from companies like Square and IBM to match their customer data with Facebook’s advertising data. The goal is to try and connect your in-store purchases back to an ad you may have come across in News Feed.

The obvious incentive is that if Facebook can prove its ads drive sales, it will be able to sell more of them.

Lovely, this is just what the world needs. Actually, the world doesn’t need this. Ever. This really is one more reason why I an less than enamored with that company as I am certain that people do not want their every activity tracked by them, or anyone else.

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