Buy Signal: Facebook Widens Data Targeting

Gunning to win more advertising dollars, Facebook is using new ways to cull personal information from outside the social network and match it with data submitted by its billion-plus users. The efforts are winning over advertisers but are further raising privacy concerns as Facebook harnesses a mosaic of information about its users.

On April 10, Facebook officially plans to roll out a new advertiser tool to help advertisers directly target Facebook users based on their offline spending history. The tool marries what Facebook already knows about people's friends and "likes" with vast troves of information from third-party data marketers such as Datalogix Inc., Acxiom Corp. and Alliance Data Systems Corp.'s Epsilon. That includes data on the Web pages that consumers visit, the email lists they have signed up for, and the way they are spending money online and offline.