Analysts have been looking for Facebook's growth rate to come in under 25 per cent for the rest of this year.
It’s
easy to believe that Facebook Inc. is an unstoppable advertising
force built on pervasive human surveillance and that meek regulatory
or legislative efforts do nothing to stop it.
Despite
those concerns, the privacy reckoning for Facebook
and the rest of the internet is denting the company’s ad machine.
Facebook
spooked investors a bit on Wednesday during a conference call to
discuss its second-quarter earnings. Executives said revenue growth
would slow more than the company previously expected at the end of
this year and into 2020, in part because of various restrictions or
self-imposed limitations on Facebook’s data harvesting.
Facebook
didn’t spill all the details about the scope of this growth sag or
the causes. Europe’s strict data privacy rules, imposed last year,
require Facebook to obtain explicit permission from people for all
sorts of data harvesting that is considered normal in the US, and
executives have said that some Europeans are saying no.
Facebook’s
revenue growth in Europe is slower than the pace in the US and Canada
and in the Asia-Pacific region. Facebook has also said the European
data rules are having an impact outside of that continent, perhaps
because of more attention on Facebook’s privacy practices.
Companies
such as Apple Inc. that control important online gateways are also
trying to crack down on the types of broad data collection in which
Facebook and others engage. And Facebook itself has imposed limits on
types of sometimes-creepy information marketers had used to target
ads and closed down some of Facebook’s own ad-targeting categories,
including ones that should not have existed.
Facebook
has also promised a long-delayed feature that would allow people to
decouple their internet browsing history from their Facebook user
profiles. The company has warned advertisers that this “clear
history” feature will make Facebook’s ads less personalised. (It
should be said that Facebook hasn’t done much to limit the kinds of
data the company itself harvests on billions of people.)
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