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November 23, 2012

Facebook to allow data sharing with Instagram

The social network will now be sharing personal user data with Instagram in efforts to build more complete profiles for targeted advertising.

By Tineka Smith

Facebook plans to combine user data from photo sharing app, Instagram with its own. The social network will also make it easier for emails to be passed between the two networks.

The social network said it may share information with other businesses or affilitaes to "help provide, understand, and improve our services and their own services."

Instagram was acquired by Facebook in September this year for $715m (£448m). The change will allow the social network to create more complete profiles of its users, thus making it easier for advertisers to target their right members.

The change will provide Facebook with the personal data of around 100 million Instagram users.

The company is also reducing user control over the "Who can send you Facebook messages" setting and will be replacing it with new filters to manage incoming messages instead.

The social network is also revoking the user’s right to vote on privacy policies.

In the past members were able to leave feedback and influence changes that Facebook made.

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However, the company said in a statement that this voting system "incentivised the quantity of comments over their quality."

"We’re proposing to end the voting component of the process in favor of a system that leads to more meaningful feedback and engagement," said Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice president for Communications, Public Policy and Marketing .

"We will continue to post significant changes to our Data Use Policy and SRR and provide a seven-day period for review and comment," he added.

Facebook’s move may raise concerns among data protection regulators as it did with Google earlier this year.

In January ,Google did a similar stunt which combined the personal information of its users from multiple web services, including its social network, Google plus. Data protection authorities became concerned that it was an invasion of user’s privacy.

 

Please follow this writer on Twitter @Tineka _S or comment below.

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