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My organisation is very sensitive about the customer information, and is unwilling to reveal customer information (email) to outside system. However I am trying to target these customer through facebook ads. For this purpose organisation is allowing me to use only md5 hash (or any other well known hashing algorithm) of the email.

Since I am unable to provide plain-text email list, is it possible to create a custom audience from list of md5 hashed emails (not plain-text).

shanmuga
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    It's actually not possible to use plaintext email to create custom audiences, you *have* to use SHA256. – Paul Bain Nov 01 '17 at 10:55

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You can use facebook custom audience feature by providing a sha256 hashed value and use those to create custom audience using facebook-ads-api.

here are some relevant links to get you started :

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/marketing-api/audiences-api/

and here are some notes if link clicking is not your thing:

Hashing and Normalization for Multi-Key

You must hash your data as SHA256; we don't support other hashing mechanisms. This is required for all data except External Identifiers, App User IDs and Page Scoped User IDs. Before hashing, normalize your data.

Email addresses - Use key EMAIL. Trimming leading and trailing whitespace and convert all characters to lowercase.

Provide SHA256 values for normalized keys and HEX representations of this value, using lowercase for A through F. The hash function in PHP converts normalized email and phone number:

example : hash("sha256", "mary@example.com") f1904cf1a9d73a55fa5de0ac823c4403ded71afd4c3248d00bdcd0866552bb79

Rishiraj Purohit
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    The op wanted to know a way to use the hash to target users via facebook ads, I don't think judging a company's business model or ethics should be discussed here. Moreover this allows facebook to match provided emails with the emails that they already have in the system and sometimes relevant ads are better than useless irrelevant ads. I won't respond further regarding moral philosophies, feel free to add technical comments and insights that might help others. – Rishiraj Purohit Jan 20 '20 at 14:26
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yes, this is a very useful feature. It can be used for advanced matching as well and not only for FB but for TikTok and Google as well. However this can be a tricky area... in countries where GDPR or similar laws are applied, sometimes this can be considered as not legal. Although the data is hashed with sha256 and transferred as such, it can not be considered as "data processing on behalf of a controller" - according to the German court. There was a case in Germany where the court decided that this can not be used. Definitely talk to your legal department and with your data protection officer. More info about this topic you can find here: https://floyk.com/en/post/setup-facebook-advanced-matching-for-websites

Igor Simic
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