Interestingly, I was reading about Facebook’s privacy flaw exposed by a Harvard student earlier today and I found another possible privacy breach affecting App Advertisers.
Most Apps use FB’s SDK for social login and campaign tracking/analytics hence FB gets access to all your App usage data. Only publicly available data around App adoption is Play Store Install bucket which is a great way for all App publishers to hide their actual active users.
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But it seems, Facebook doesn’t think that data is private enough, hence they chose to openly show this number accurate to the last digit.
While I am not entirely sure about the accuracy of this data for all the Apps using FB for Install Ads, but this points to the monthly active users of the App as captured by FB SDK. I could confirm this across 15 Apps and numbers matched the active users shown by Facebook Insights.
Not all Ads show this number as it comes randomly for some Apps. Shocking part is that App advertisers can’t turn this off. At least I could not find any such option.
I will be mighty upset to see this data being publicly available for my Apps. I might be reading it wrong, so please suggest what is this data point in above Ads? Tag me on twitter at twitter.com/deepakabbot or leave your comments here.
Feel free to email me at dabbot@gmail.com
