There’s been a lot of discussion over the past few days about the recent changes to Facebook’s privacy and governance policies — including the revelation that (gasp!) Facebook is not actually a democracy — but one element of the new rules has gotten less attention than it probably should: namely, the fact that the giant social network is going to use the data it has about your likes and dislikes to show you ads outside of Facebook. This is the first real confirmation that the company is going to roll out an advertising network that extends beyond just its own walled garden, and it could turn out to be one of the biggest factors in the success or failure of Facebook’s revenue-growth strategy.

It’s true that the network wants to do away with the voting process that it implemented as a way of improving its governance policies, which required…