Page 35 - ITU Journal - ICT Discoveries - Volume 1, No. 2, December 2018 - Second special issue on Data for Good

ITU JOURNAL: ICT Discoveries, Vol. 1(2), December 2018

3.2 Key activity interest) and express their opinion, affiliations and
interests freely. User can build up a representative
Under the dimension ‘Key Activity’, Hartmann et al. social eminence that might be also relevant in their
[1] cluster seven data-related activities (see Fig. 1). professional lives (e.g. ‘content creators’ as well).
As highlighted before, Facebook generates a large
data pool of internal and external data (‘Data Companies and organization however, use the
Generation’), processes this data and provides some platform to interact with the users as their
of the data itself as well as analytical insights (potential) customers and in order to place targeted
(‘Processing’) to other companies that advertise on advertisements. The social context, i.e. the digital
the platform. According to their press release [28], footprint that every individual Facebook user
they stopped the acquisition of third-party data). produces, enables sophisticated and effective
However, the exchange of data with their targeting [31]. Moreover, the company is offering
advertising clients can be perceived indirectly as several ad analytics tools and application
‘Data Acquisition’. For example, with the ‘Facebook programming interfaces (APIs). The sheer number
Ad Manager’ tool, where the company offers a of APIs and developer kits such as the Graph API
dashboard to the advertisers, distributes the allows for the integration of Facebook in various
aggregated data (‘Aggregation’ and ‘Distribution’) other websites and applications adding further
and analyze and visualize insights (‘Analytics’ and value to them by including the social context of
‘Visualization’). Moreover, the vast number of APIs Facebook’s data pool.
such as the ’Facebook Ad API’ and other Marketing
APIs, provide an interoperability of certain The GDPR’s right to data portability is very likely to
aggregated user data for advertisers and partners impact Facebook’s offering. There are vast
that are then able to import this data into their opportunities to expand the platform’s business
systems [29]. model based on the possibility to import data from
other platforms. Theoretically, the regulation
GDPR’s right to data portability and the push for a makes it possible to integrate the data of other
more interoperable collection of data, provides digital platforms and offerings within another
opportunities for companies such as Facebook to platform given the user’s consent. The
increase the quality and value of their data, as well requirements for interoperability are complex
as that of their analytics tools and improve the however, and the regulation remains vague
quality of consumer targeting for advertisements. (arguing simply with a required ‘machine-readable’
Indeed, this could even increase revenues as their format). Certainly, these requirements have to be
key activity could become more valuable. refined in the future in order to achieve pure
interoperability, for example, allowing social media
3.3 Offering users to network with each other across different
platforms [32]. As an example, Facebook could offer
The dimension offering describes the value that is an import function for data that the music
created by a DDBM and substitutes the common streaming platform ‘Spotify’ stores from their users
dimension ‘value proposition’ which is known from (given the user’s consent for the data export) and
other business model analysis frameworks such as expand their business model with the additional
from [8] or [14]. It describes the concrete product data. The regulation sets a cornerstone for an
or service value that is offered to the clients [1]. interoperability standard with an innovation-
spawning character. It might spur business model
Facebook is a multi-sided platform. These platforms innovations from niche start-ups that specialize in
are characterized by direct interactions between certain data that users might export of e.g. Facebook
multiple distinct types of clients [30]. Consequently, and develop an offering around this data.
it also unifies different offerings outlined here very
briefly: For private individuals, the platform allows 3.4 Target customer
users to connect and interact with other individuals
such as friends, family members or colleagues via Hartmann et al. [1] use the generic classification of
profile pages, chat messengers, groups etc. business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-
Moreover, it allows the user to consume partially customer (B2C) models to classify customer
tailored content (e.g. via posts of other users or segments. Their analysis revealed that many of the
pages of corporates, organizations or persons of analyzed start-ups targeted both types of customer

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