Facebook says no to third-party data for targeted ads

In yet another attempt to safeguard users' data privacy on its platform, Facebook has announced it will no longer allow third-party data for targeting advertisements.

"We want to let advertisers know that we will be shutting down Partner Categories," Facebook said on Thursday.

Partner Categories allows third-party data aggregators to offer their targeting directly on Facebook.

"While this is common industry practice, we believe this step, winding down over the next six months, will help improve people's privacy on Facebook," the social media giant said in a blog post.

The move comes amid the fallout from the data privacy scandal where it emerged that data of about 50 million users had been harvested and passed on to London-based political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica.

Facebook also announced to pause its app review process to "implement new changes".

"To maintain the trust people place in Facebook when they share information, we are making some updates to the way our platform works. We paused app review while we implement new changes to our platform," the company said.

Facebook said it will conduct an in-depth review of its platform in the coming days.

"We will investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform in 2014 to reduce data access, and we are conducting a full audit of any app with suspicious activity."

If we find developers that misused personally identifiable information, "we will ban them from our platform. Moving forward, if we remove an app for misusing data, we will notify everyone who used it", it added.

Facebook also announced to expand its bug bounty programme where people can report if they find misuses of data by app developers.

The social media giant on Wednesday announced an overhaul of its privacy tools that will make it easier for users to find and edit the personal information the company holds.