Hasta La Creative!

If you thought that Facebook’s anonymous login announcement at F8 was merely a publicity stunt, you were wrong. The social media platform, with more than 1.28 billion users, is seemingly taking a lesson from its newly acquired company WhatsApp — protecting and better serving its users over its advertisers, which is what WhatsApp is notorious for doing so well.

This isn’t Facebook’s attempt to continue to attract users to the platform, and it certainly isn’t a move that has stakeholders particularly excited (less ad revenue is never a good thing in the boardroom). Rather, it is the world’s largest social media company taking responsibility for the massive troves of identity data it has collected. It is Facebook laying the groundwork for the future of online identity, taking the White House’s 78-page big-data report to heart and making data collection and usage transparency a requirement for brands.

Those in the big data industry have long been advocating for such a move from such an influential company. After all, with behemoths like Google processing 20+ petabytes of data a day, Walmart handling more than 1 million customer transactions every hour, and YouTube having 100 hours of video content uploaded to the platform every minute, the underdogs in the big data field need the large corporations to do the right thing.

Continue reading at AdAge.com