Facebook today proposed changes to its Data Use Policy and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities that will allow the company to share information with affiliates like Instagram and put an end to site governance voting, among other more minor changes.

New language about “affiliates” has been added to the Data Use Policy to cover Facebook’s relationship with Instagram, which it acquired this year. The proposed policy reads:

We may share information we receive with businesses that are legally part of the same group of companies that Facebook is part of, or that become part of that group (often these companies are called affiliates). Likewise, our affiliates may share information with us as well. We and our affiliates may use shared information to help provide, understand, and improve our services and their own services.

Even though Instagram is continuing to operate under its original brand rather than Facebook’s, the company is legally considered an affiliate and the two services can share information, for instance, to personalize a user’s experience or target ads.

The company is also looking to change a policy that it believes promotes quantity over quality feedback. In 2009 Facebook decided to give users the option to review proposed policy changes and then offer a vote if more than 7,000 users comment on those changes. This led to a situation where users copy-pasted the same comment over and over to trigger a vote on policy changes earlier this year. However, not enough users ended up voting to prevent Facebook’s proposal from going through, since results are only binding if at least 30 percent of users participate. Nonetheless, the entire situation was less than ideal and so Facebook is looking to remove the voting option completely.
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Data visualization company SumAll today announced it raised $6 million in a Series A round led by Battery Ventures. The funding agreement includes $500,000 for SumAll.org, a charitable foundation established by employees of the company.

SumAll’s free service helps companies understand how their social marketing efforts have an impact on sales. Users connect their Facebook, Twitter, Google Analytics, eBay, PayPal, Shopify or other social networks and payment processing accounts to SumAll. Through an interactive dashboard, they can select which data sources to compare over different time periods.

For example, a business could look at whether an influx of new fans on Facebook correlates with revenue in any way. It could see whether Facebook engagement leads to additional transactions, or if fan advocacy has more of an effect on sales from new customers or existing customers.

CEO Dane Atkinson told us in August that the company may begin to charge for access to deeper insights down the line, but he believes that people should be able to see their data for free.

The New York company previously raised $1.5 million from Battery Ventures, Wellington Partners and General Catalyst Partners in June. Battery Ventures and Wellington Partners both participated in this latest round. SumAll says it now reaches 15,000 users in over 30 countries and tracks $1.5 billion in e-commerce data.

The company’s employees donated 10 percent of their personal holding in the company to found SumAll.org, an organization that aims to “elicit change in people’s lives through data.”

Facebook today announced that it will offer a self-service conversion measurement feature for direct response marketers and expand the capabilities of its Optimized CPM bidding option to incorporate conversion data.

Facebook tells us marketers will be able to use its tool to generate a unique bit of code to add to any page on their website where they want to measure conversions, for example, checkout pages or registration forms. When marketers choose Optimized CPM bidding, Facebook’s system will show ads to users who are most likely to convert.

Most significantly, this new tool will be available via the self-serve Facebook ad platform, which could help a range of advertisers improve their campaigns and see more results. Some of the social network’s top advertisers have been able to work with the company to do this type of conversion tracking for about a year, if not longer. Other large advertisers work with third-party ad companies to track and optimize their campaigns for conversions. This new tool will allow conversion tracking for smaller advertisers who are using Facebook ads to drive online actions.

For Facebook, it will be important to keep the process for the advertiser very simple and provide enough education about tracking and optimized bidding. The company tried implementing a conversion tracking tool in 2010, but ended the beta less than a year later. A Facebook engineer said the test resulted in a lot of confusion among advertisers and required too much overhead to provide user support. The company says the difference now is the combination of conversion measurement and Optimized CPM.

Facebook began testing the Optimized CPM bidding option late last year. The feature allows advertisers to set their marketing goals, and then have Facebook’s system automatically serve ads in a way that achieves those goals as efficiently as possible. Some advertisers are initially skeptical of this because it means they do not control their own bids, but Facebook says it can capture the highest-value impressions for an advertiser’s goals, and the total ROI on a campaign is likely to exceed that of either a CPC or a traditional CPM campaign. Fab.com, which beta tested Optimized CPM with conversion tracking, saw 39 percent lower costs per action using this type of bidding.

Preferred Marketing Developers who offer self-serve software or managed services for Facebook advertising typically have their own conversion tracking tools that go beyond the basic functionality Facebook is making available. Optimal CEO Rob Leathern says his company and other PMDs are focused on larger enterprise customers that need advanced features like view-based conversion and engagement tracking, server-side conversion tracking and return on ad spend metrics that consider conversion values like purchase price. Still, he’s glad to see Facebook taking steps to prove the value of its ads across the board.

“This is a positive development for everyone in the ecosystem. Any movements towards more accountability and the ability to track ROI will just lead to more ad spend and more activity in the Facebook ads ecosystem, so we welcome it,” Leathern says. He added, “We also allow companies to create their own completely flexible optimization rules that refer to any Facebook-supplied metrics (e.g. likes, video views, photo views, whatever), use Facebook’s bidding optimization or combine them, so this will add additional value for our customers.”

Social advertising company Compass Labs this week announced the arrival of CLIQ Social Intelligence, a platform to provide brands and agencies with key insights about their audiences, including customer interests, media preferences, demographic makeup and more.

Compass Labs offers managed advertising services, as well as self-serve software, but VP of Marketing Molly Glover Gallatin says the company found that advertisers are looking for more than ad creation and optimization. The CLIQ Social Intelligence platform aims to give companies a better understanding of their owned and earned media, in addition to paid.

Businesses will be able to see their Facebook and Twitter analytics, track brand competitors and see trends among their fans. Beyond the gender, age and location information that is available from Facebook’s own insights tool, CLIQ Social Intelligence shows stats on family status and ethnicity. It also highlights the most popular sports, teams, athletes, music, movies, YouTube videos, websites and apps among a page’s fans.

This type of information can logically be applied to brands’ social ad targeting or content strategy, but many businesses are finding that these insights can influence all aspects of their marketing and overall business. For instance, a pet food brand learned that its fans had greater affinity for Target than Walmart, so it worked to get more of its products on the shelves at Target. Another brand is using its audience’s music preferences to seek out partnership opportunities with musicians for a new campaign.

With the new tool, Compass Labs can now claim the Facebook Preferred Marketing badge in Insights. It previously was only certified in ads.

Naked Communications and the Seventh Generation CPG brand were involved in the of the CLIQ Social Intelligence platform.

All Power Editor users and Ads API partners are now eligible to use Facebook’s “Custom Audience” feature to retarget consumers by email address, phone number or user IDs.

The option was previously only available to advertisers with managed accounts through a Facebook representative. Now we’ve seen it live in our own Power Editor account and heard from Facebook partners that it is available for them to implement. TechCrunch confirmed with Facebook that AdParlor, Alchemy Social, GraphEffect, Kenshoo, Nanigans, Social Moov and Optimal already offer custom audience targeting. This is in addition to Salesforce Buddy Media, which announced the capability at its Dreamforce conference on Thursday.

There is no minimum spend required to use custom audiences, but advertisers must have access to Power Editor or work with a third-party vendor. The option is not available from the main self-serve ad tool.

When we first discovered the new targeting opportunity, we could not view the terms of service. They are now available here. Advertisers must agree they have consent from the data subjects whose data they are using and agree to remove a person’s data from the custom audience if they later opt-out of having their data used for commercial or promotional purposes.

Marketers can upload CSV or TXT files to Facebook, which hashes the data so users’ identities and information are protected. Facebook then runs this list against its own hashed database to find matches that can be targeted with ads. When this is done, the data is discarded, neither side collects more information about users. Hashed data cannot be decrypted.

Just as with other Facebook ads, the estimated reach can not be fewer than 20 users, so a company will not be able to serve ads to an individual user by email address, phone number or user ID. Some users have added backup email addresses to Facebook or listed a number of addresses on their profile over the years. Facebook will try to find a match among any of these.

After the advertiser’s and Facebook’s hashed data is compared, ads will be targeted to matches that fit the advertiser’s overall targeting criteria. Advertisers will be able to see what percentage of their audience they reached, but if they want to run additional campaigns, they’ll have to upload and hash their data again since it is discarded each time for security. Advertisers cannot use data they gain from custom audience campaigns for any purpose outside of Facebook.

Related Story:
Email, phone number and user ID targeting: how Facebook is helping businesses reach the right audiences

Facebook shares sink further – Facebook shares closed at $19.05 today, dropping more than 4 percent as the lock-out period ended and large investors were able to begin selling their shares. The number of shares available for trading increased 60 percent on Thursday, which led the stock to fall 6.3 percent that day. In all, Facebook’s value has been cut in half from its IPO price of $38. Over the next nine months, more shares will be freed up, which could push the price even lower.

Instagram deal could be closer to closing - Facebook is reportedly looking to push its acquisition of Instagram forward by using a California law that allows it to issue shares without approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission. The deal has been delayed because of SEC investigations that occur whenever companies make large acquisitions. The U.K.’s Office of Fair Trading approved the deal earlier this week. Until the deal goes through, the two companies must operate independently. Instagram, for example, launched a blog for businesses and added a new photo map feature this week.

Facebook looks to expand Oregon data center – Facebook filed an application with the city of Prineville, Ore., to construct a new data center near its existing facility opened there in April 2011. The proposed 62,000-square-foot building is nicknamed “Sub-Zero” and will house a new type of deep-storage device that powers off when it’s not in use. Currently a rack of Facebook servers use about 4.5 kilowatts. Facebook tells Wired that its goal is to have the new servers operate at around 1.5 kW.

Social games and App Center reach new milestones – Facebook shared that there are more than 235 million people playing games on Facebook.com each month, compared to 205 million during this time last year. The number of people playing games on Facebook has grown by 8.4 percent since the beginning of the year. In July, Facebook drove people to the App Store and Google Play more than 170 million times. More than 150 million people used the App Center in the past month. The new section of the site is driving 2.4 times more installs than the previous apps and games dashboard. Facebook also says users who install an app from the App Center are 35 percent more likely than the average user to return to the app the following day and 17 percent more likely to return within a week.

Facebook plans national convention presence - Facebook announced its plans to be involved in both the Republican and Democratic national conventions, including holding events about the social network and its marketing and app platform, giving conventioneers opportunities to share their experience and launching the “I’m Voting” app.

Facebook launches payer promotion API – Facebook released a new API this week to allow social game developers to see whether a person is eligible for a “payer promotion” and then serve them with a custom unit to highlight the offer. The payer promotion, which is subsidized by Facebook, gives certain users a discount on virtual currency. Now in addition to letting users know about these promotions through TrialPay offer walls and DealSpot, developers can create their own in-game units that may increase conversion and lead players to buy more currency.

Facebook updated its policy on Wednesday to make it clear that developers can not use the platform to export user data from Facebook to be used in another social network.

The company has long had policies that prohibit apps from transferring data to third parties such as ad networks and data brokers, but until now it hadn’t been quite as clear about that policy applying to other social networks. Director of Developer Products Doug Purdy addressed the issue in a blog post last year, though the company’s stance wasn’t fully reflected in official policy documents.

The full policy related to competing social networks is below. Section A is the newly added content.

Competing social networks: (a) You may not use Facebook Platform to export user data into a competing social network without our permission; (b) Apps on Facebook may not integrate, link to, promote, distribute, or redirect to any app on any other competing social network.

Facebook says its platform is designed to enable rich social apps, not serve as a data export tool. The company says apps that aim to export data into networks like Google+ should use the Download Your Information tool, not the platform APIs. However, the format of that export is not necessarily useful for transferring data to another social profile. It includes some email addresses, but only for friends that have opted into sharing this information. The option is buried within the email settings section of account settings, so it’s unlikely that many users have done this.

Google and Facebook blocked or put up roadblocks on importing and exporting data between their services in November 2010. Google had accused Facebook of not supporting data portability because users couldn’t export email addresses of friends, but could import addresses from services like Gmail. Facebook responded by saying the email addresses of friends are not a user’s own data, and therefore they don’t have the right to export them. Meanwhile, it allowed these same email addresses to be exported through Yahoo! Mail and some smaller third-party email services.

Facebook also came under some criticism recently when it began hiding users’ email addresses and showing their Facebook.com addresses instead. At the time, we wondered whether the change was related to preventing contact importing and exporting, but Facebook did not comment on this issue.

Page owners and fans can now view the most popular videos and news articles about a topic by visiting the brand or public figure’s Facebook page.

In the “posts by others” view of Timeline, some pages have “news” and/or “video” modules that shows what users have been reading and watching in Open Graph-integrated apps like Socialcam, Washington Post Social Reader, ESPN, Hulu and others. It’s unclear when Facebook added these modules to pages’ Timelines, but with more media apps integrating Open Graph and more people using them, the data here is increasingly valuable.

[Update 6/10/12 4:49 p.m. PT - Facebook engineer Alejandro Marcu, who works on pages, tells us these modules were added to pages on June. 15.]

The following is an example from Lebron James’ page. Further down is an example from Starbucks’ page.

Visitors to a page will be able to view these modules to find related content about a company, public figure or entity, such as a movie or TV show. They can also see which videos and stories are most popular among their friends, in addition to what’s trending overall. These features help make Facebook pages a destination for users to learn about people and products through a social lens. In the future, pages could include even more information from Open Graph apps, for instance, how many users indicated that they bought an item, saw a movie, read a book and more.

The top videos and top news modules are also useful for page owners to get a better sense of what other apps people are using to learn about their company. For example, Starbucks will see that many people are watching videos mentioning Starbucks on Socialcam, but none of these are official videos from the brand. Starbucks might want to consider how to get more of their own content on the video sharing site.

Page owners might also use the modules to get insights about which video and news apps are popular among their target audience. If they see which apps people are using to watch videos or read about a competitor, they can consider ways to get their own brand content on those channels.

If a page does not allow users to write on the Wall, it will not include any of these modules because there is no “posts by others” filter to view. As we wrote about earlier, music pages also have these two modules and an additional one that highlights the artists’ most popular songs.

Facebook adopted a new Data Use Policy and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities on Friday after a user vote failed to generate enough response to be considered binding, according to a note on the Facebook Site Governance page.

In its second-ever user vote, users had the option to vote for Facebook’s existing policies or new proposed policies through a relatively simple app. Although 297,883 people voted for Facebook to keep its existing policies, overall not enough users participated for the results to become a mandate. According to Facebook’s governing documents, results are only “advisory” when fewer than 30 percent of all monthly active users vote.

In this case, many of the votes for the existing policy were the result of an activist campaign that actually calls for sweeping changes not offered by either policy. The vote itself was triggered by the campaign, in which user Max Schrems encouraged thousands of users to comment “I oppose the changes and want a vote about the demands on www.our-policy.org.” Facebook always gives users the option to review proposed policy changes, but if more than 7,000 users comment on those changes, the policy is put up to a vote.

“We did reach the threshold because a viral meme was created, and unfortunately the result is a vote,” Facebook Chief Privacy Officer for Policy Erin Egan told TechCrunch earlier this month.

The newly implemented policies do not include any major changes to how the social network collects or uses user data. The changes are mostly updated wording — for example, using “Timeline” instead of “profile” — and added clarification about existing policy. Clearer examples and user tips have been added to the Data Use Policy per recommendations from the Irish Data Protection Commissioner’s Office, which audited the social network’s data collection practices last year.

“We strongly believe these updates provide you with more detail and transparency about our data protections and practices,” Facebook wrote in the note announcing the decision to adopt the proposed policies. ”We received a great deal of positive feedback about these changes from our regulators and the many other stakeholders – including privacy and consumer groups – we consulted about these revisions.”

Facebook says it will review its site governance process following the low participation. A total of only 342,632 users voted. That’s about 0.38 percent of active users, and only 15 percent of people who Like the Facebook Site Governance page, which posted several times about the vote. Facebook also ran mobile and desktop ads to encourage participation. As far as we know, the company did not send emails or prompt users with messages above their News Feeds, which might have resulted in more feedback.

The new Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, also known as a terms of service agreement, is available here. Facebook’s Data Use Policy, formerly known as its privacy policy, is here.

Facebook proposed a number of changes to its Data Use Policy on Friday, including an updated disclosure about the potential for Facebook data to be used to serve ads on other sites.

The social network also added a number of examples and tips for users to better understand its policies. A pdf of the tracked changes and an explanation of the proposed updates are available from the Facebook Site Governance page. Users have until this coming Friday at 5 p.m. PDT to comment on the changes.

Notably, Facebook has modified its wording about the potential for ads off Facebook to suggest that if it began showing these ads, they may or may not include social context. Part of what makes Facebook ads effective is that they highlight the connections between a business and a user’s friends. However, users might be upset if this information began appearing in ads elsewhere online. Perhaps the company is considering whether to create an ad network that doesn’t show these connections so explicitly. Regardless of whether its ads display social context, the demographic and interest data Facebook has on more than 900 million users could allow Facebook to create an ad network that targets ads more effectively than Google’s AdSense.

Most of the changes Facebook is proposing to its Data Use Policy include editing language related to new features like Sponsored Stories, Timeline and Activity Log. The company has also added clearer examples of what its policy means for users per recommendations from the Irish Data Protection Commissioner’s Office, which audited the social network’s data collection practices last year. Here are some of the significant additions to the policy:

• New language that explains how Facebook will retain data. The company will continue to retain most data received from advertisers for 180 days, but it notes that there may be some times when it will need to keep information longer. For example, if an advertiser creates a Facebook page, the social network won’t delete information the advertiser puts on its page simply because 180 days had passed. Instead, Facebook will delete it when when the page owner deleted it or closed its account.
• New language to explain that, in addition to websites, apps — including those on page tabs — may also use instant personalization.
• New section explaining Facebook’s use of “cookies” and other tracking technologies.
• New language about groups and subgroups to reflect the launch of “Groups for Schools,” which are special groups that are only open to people who have a confirmed email address for a particular school.

Since 2009, the social network has taken a unique approach with its terms of service. Before instituting any new policies, the company shares proposed changes with users, who then have a period of time to comment and ask questions. For example, in April, Facebook proposed revisions to its Statement of Rights and Responsibilities based on feedback it received on the first draft in March. In some cases, Facebook even puts issues up to a vote.

Last week the social network created a new hub for all of its terms and policies here.