Facebook Audience Insights offers user insights including demographics, page likes, location and language, Facebook usage and purchase activity. This information can be gathered on three different groups: the general Facebook audience, people connected to a brand’s page, and people in custom-created audiences. This differs from the Page Insights offer, which looks only at interactions with a specific page.

In the information supplied on the Facebook site, the company is keen to stress that the product has been developed “with privacy in mind”. It states that Audience Insights “surfaces aggregated information people already express on Facebook, along with information from trusted third-party partners – like Acxiom – through our partner categories targeting”.

This comes just days after fitness app Moves was criticised for updating its privacy policy to allow wider sharing of user data, following its recent acquisition by Facebook.