Privacy, social networking and advertising dollars
Tuesday, November 6th, 2007Yesterday, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner released a short Flash presentation (complete with sound) What does a friend of a friend of a friend need to know about you?.
This presentation is a good introduction/summary to what many already know thanks to the news coverage about Facebook & MySpace’s targeted advertising ventures. As a Facebook addict myself, I know that it’s all too easy to forget about privacy when one is taking quizzes or completing all the fields in profiles. After all, it’s quite seductive to think that someone else might actually be interested enough to read your profile—and maybe even think that you’re cool! The truth is that “someone else” is more likely to be an advertiser than even a friend (I personally rarely even read the profiles of my closest friends… after all, I know them in “real life).
In September, I wrote A Primer On Privacy And Facebook for a friend who was concerned about other Facebookers and how much of her life they could see. I naively forgot to consider what other companies/people could know about her by giving Facebook money to advertise a product or service to her.
The concept of targeted advertising is tricky—after all, we don’t pay any money for our usage of Facebook and they need to have money to maintain their operations. But while we don’t directly give social networks any money, we do have to surrender some privacy and some of our copyrights (most social networking sites demand “worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive license(s)” to duplicate and distribute user-generated content; not a problem for most, but people who use social networking sites professionally must take heed).
Will all of this make people back off from social networking sites and return to email? Probably not. Especially because services like Gmail are already providing targeted advertising with the content of your email. But we do need to be smarter and more careful about the information we put out there.
