This article helps affiliates understand the data privacy our network ensures when connecting their social media channels to their Commission Factory account.
When either signing up to our network or connecting a social media channel in your existing Commission Factory account a small browser window will appear to prompt you to sign in to your social media account, this is completely normal.
The browser window connection is direct with that social media network. For example, when connecting your Facebook account, we directly talk to Facebook using Facebook's API, which means Commission Factory has an approved development account and an approved Facebook app.
This is used to retrieve info about the user such as their Facebook/Twitter/YouTube/etc. ID number, URL, display name, etc. For social networks with multiple pages like Facebook, we ask for a full list of pages that the user has edit access to - so each page has a name, URL, possibly statistics like the total number of likes, and so on.
Some social media networks also provide things like the total number of followers or the total number of likes, so we record that. This information is helpful for our Publisher Development Team when vetting initial network affiliate applications, as well as for advertisers when affiliates apply to their programs. This is because engagement and audience statistics play a large role in some brands' approval criteria.
Please note our network only ever requests read-only access, so we will never try to post anything to a user's feed or control their account in any way. We also don't look into anything like friend lists, personal info, uploaded photos, etc. When users attempt to connect a social media network, the network itself will tell them which permissions we (Commission Factory) have asked for to ensure transparency.
For more information on how to optimise your affiliate account, please see another one of our Help Centre guides here.