DURBAN - Facebook is rushing to add safeguards against the misuse of user data as the company tries to recover from the backlash over the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
According to Techcrunch, Facebook will launch a certification tool that demands that marketers ensure that email addresses used for ad targeting were properly attained.
The social networking company will also stop the sharing of custom audience data across its business accounts.
A snippet of a message was sent by a representative of the social network company to a client. The note said that for any custom audiences data imported into Facebook, advertisers will first need to represent and warrant that rightful user content has be obtained.
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Facebook spokesperson Elisabeth Diana confirmed to TechCrunch that the company was building a permissions tool. According to Diana the tool will require that advertisers and their agency representatives will have to pledge that they have permission to use the data.
Facebook is hoping to stop the further abuse of ill-gotten data after Dr. Aleksandr Kogan's app that pulled data on 50 million Facebook's users was passed on to British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.
The data pulled by the consulting firm is suspected to be used by them to support the Trump and Brexit campaigns, which used Custom Audiences to get to voters.
Custom Audiences was launched by the social networking company in in 2012 to allow businesses to upload hashed lists of their customers email addresses or phone numbers, which allows advertisers to target specific people instead large demographics.