Facebook’s limits on using data brokers won’t stop tracking

NEW YORK — Facebook’s decision to stop working with third-party data collectors might earn it public-relations points, but it does little to protect your privacy. Facebook may try to defuse that criticism by saying it’s backing off on some data use, said Jon Reily, vice president of commerce strategy at the digital consulting company SapientRazorfish. Late Wednesday, Facebook said it was shutting down a type of advertising product that allowed marketers to use data from people’s offline lives to target them on Facebook. Facebook said shutting down the advertising feature over the next six months “will help improve people’s privacy on Facebook.” But it wouldn’t have stopped Cambridge Analytica from grabbing data inappropriately through an app that purported to be a research tool. And even without direct access to the brokers’ data, Facebook was already able to build prediction models based on it, said Kenneth Sanford, lead analytics architect at the data science company Dataiku.