digital marketing

How Tinder, Airbnb, TripAdvisor, and Bumble could leak even more Facebook Data than Trump’s Consulting Firm Cambridge Analytica

“The data analytics firm that helped Donald Trump get elected president” was suspended from accessing Facebook’s Ads platform this weekend. The penalty was not because their data was stolen from Facebook, but because they “paid to acquire the personal information through an outside researcher“. In 2015, a Cambridge University researcher used features of Facebook’s platform to get 270,000 users to surrender the data of 50 million total users, simply by quietly asking for permission to access the information of their “friends”. The only reason this data violated their terms of service was that the data was illicitly transferred from the researcher to Cambridge Analytica (unrelated to the university).

It is true that Facebook no longer allows apps to request that you hand over the likes, photos, and location of your friends, but a relevant current question is this: In 2018, are there Facebook-connected apps that could leak even more personal data than Cambridge Analytica acquired? That answer seems to be a resounding yes. While the permissions are tightened, the growth of mobile apps and social sign-in have grown as well.

Here are 4 popular apps (and there are certainly many more) that need to be very clear with users how their data is being protected and how it will be used in the future:

1. Tinder – 100+ million users at risk

This online-dating juggernaut understandable asks you to login with Facebook to establish your identity, and uses your friends , photos, and “likes” to match you with potential interests. If you grants these permissions even once, any of these apps can collect all of this data, forever, until you disconnect the app. Tinder is owned by media conglomerate IAC, which gives it ample temptation to use this user data to sell ad targeting similar to Trump and Cambridge Analytica.

2. Airbnb – 90+ million users at risk

Travel bookings site Airbnb also uses social logins to help establish your identity to keep you safe. They ask for access to your photos to help you share details of your trips, and likely use your interests to try and help you find lodging. Airbnb has no obvious reasons to misuse this data, but they clearly have access to a lot, and if they were hacked, or acquired by a more diversified company, that story could change.

3. TripAdvisor – 70+ million users at risk

This travel review mainstay also asks for permanent access to your likes and photos. Similar to Tinder, they are owned by Liberty Media, which owns everything from Sports teams to SiriusXM Radio to 1/3 of LiveNation/Ticketmaster. This is a tremendous amount of data to protect against external threats as well as internal temptations to monetize this data for advertisers.

4. Bumble – 27 million users at risk

A rising star in the online dating space, Bumble has the same reasonable reasons to ask for “likes” and photos as Tinder, and the same challenges. Bumble is majority-owned by Badoo & their owner, “secretive Russian entrepreneur Andrey Andreev“. Considering the ongoing concerns about Russia’s interest in using social media data to target ads and influence elections, this site’s rapidly growing dataset is interesting, especially since it sits further away from the reach of U.S. regulation.

Now What?

This is a challenging situation. We all want our apps to be easy to use, and to have access to details of our lives that improve the app experience. Most of us don’t even mind if some personal data is used to show us ads we like instead of ads we don’t like.

A few next steps that could help this situation:

Apps using these permissions should make their intentions abundantly clear. Will this data be used for anything other than directly serving user needs within the app? Should the platforms even allow that? Could they prevent it with certainty?
Facebook and similar sites should consider adopting less permanent access, where users who haven’t visited the site recently are not still subjects of data harvesting
Less “friendly” permissions processes. It’s extremely easy right now to give an app nearly-permanent access to every picture or interest you ever post to Facebook. Now that image recognition is cheap and easy, this is data is too revealing to be granted trivially.

For Media Inquiries about Facebook Advertising Strategy around the U.S. Presidential Election and other Advanced Digital Marketing Tactics and Measurement, please contact Rob Kischuk at 404.663.9945, rob@convergehq.com, or @rkischuk / @GetConverge

As a Marketing Reporting Automation and Analytics company, Converge is committed to responsible and ethical data collection practices that protect the privacy of individuals and the data policies of the data sources we connect to.

(Methodology: in the case of Bumble and Tinder, since these apps require social login, actual total app downloads were used. In other cases, we used March 2018 actual Monthly Active Users, and assumed at least 2/3 user attrition over the past 90 days)

CMOs Make The Best CEOs

Has there always been a secret (or maybe not so secret) assumption that CMOs aren’t suited for the CEO role? Think about it; I can name COOs, CTOs, and CFOs who have all gone on to become CEO but not too many CMOs in recent years.

Maybe that’s because there wasn’t much proof as to what marketers did? And then came the assumption that people who could make great products could also become great CEOs. Think about Facebook, Square, Paypal, Apple, and Twitter. The creators of these products and technology often rewarded themselves with the CEO title, and that is kind of what we got used to.

But a transition is once again underway. Where businesses realize the importance of marketing, how essential it is to sales and that maybe to have a great product you have to know the people who are going to buy it. Continue reading “CMOs Make The Best CEOs”

How Marketers Can Help CMOs Overcome These 3 Common Worries

With tight budgets, seemingly endless lists of goals and not to mention the mountain of expectations, CMOs are looking to balance the art of creativity and data-driven marketing. And you, as marketers, can help.

With the rise of measurement marketing technologies, the increased use of digital marketing and the availability of data, it is (or should be) easier than ever to track results and help deliver on those expectations.

(Psst- don’t have time to read the whole post? Download our quick reference guide here or get the entire guide emailed to you here.)

Continue reading “How Marketers Can Help CMOs Overcome These 3 Common Worries”

What Is The Agency Of The Future?

Among several other agency and brand breakups this summer McDonald’s decision to part ways with their 35-year-old agency in the U.S., Publicis Groupe’s Leo Burnett shows that times are changing.

In an effort to modernize and consolidate their nearly 1 billion dollar advertising budget McDonalds conducted an agency review earlier this year in an effort to find “the agency of the future”. Continue reading “What Is The Agency Of The Future?”

Taking Your Analytics & Reporting Beyond Social

The marketing technology landscape has exploded. Just take a look at Scott Brinker’s supergraphic where he lists nearly 4,000 companies providing some sort of marketing technology solution in 2016.

All the marketing technology available in 2016 — chiefmartec.com

Being in the space ourselves (you can find Converge under Dashboards & Data Visualizations in the blue column) we understand there are a lot of options depending on what problems you are trying to solve. But what we have also realized is that so much of this marketing technology is now only focused on social analytics.

Continue reading “Taking Your Analytics & Reporting Beyond Social”

Let’s Get Personal: A Digital Marketing Experience

According to The Content Wrangler, personalization is the process of targeting content to individuals based on one or more of the following: who they are; where they are; when, why, and how they access content; and what device they use to access it.

Marketers have learned a lot about the personalization process over the past several years and so have consumers. Consumers have been exposed to different experiences of personalization through various mediums (that item you looked at online following you to a Facebook ad) that produce different quality of results- it seems like they too now understand the value that personalization can deliver. Continue reading “Let’s Get Personal: A Digital Marketing Experience”

3 Questions You Need To Ask When Measuring Social Data

Before you start setting goals and plugging data into an excel sheet you first need to understand how and what to measure when it comes to social media and that can be confusing.

Nearly every social platform has an analytics tool, and almost every social platform seems to give you something different to measure. However, if you can look past the terminology, settle for the information you do get and stop wishing for more, you will discover that most channels can not only be measured but also compared. Continue reading “3 Questions You Need To Ask When Measuring Social Data”