Kerfuffle is the only way to describe the latest controversy over Facebook and its new stance towards its user’s privacy. The truth is that Facebook can’t believe in privacy anymore because if it does, it doesn’t have much of a future. The future of Facebook (and of every other social network) lies in its ability to monetize its user base. The best way to monetize your user base is to collect and organize that highly detailed and targeted information and sell it to marketers. Or package it in a way that marketers can deploy it using the internet’s ingrained and sophisticated form of advertising.
From today’s Financial Times:
Facebook is thus important not only to investors but to everyone interested in the future of the internet, which is practically all of us. If it decides, in Google’s phrase for deceiving or messing around with its customers, to “be evil” then millions feel the effects.
Unfortunately, Mark Zuckerberg, the 25-year-old who founded Facebook as a private social network for Harvard students, has recently been displaying a disregard bordering on disdain for Facebook users’ right to maintain control over personal information.
This is the dilemma facing social networks. If they go too far with their user’s data, then they run the risk of losing the trust of those user’s (perhaps the most important equity there is in the 21st century). But if they don’t go far enough, then they aren’t of much value in the long run.
I think what we are missing in all of this is that our definition of Privacy is shifting. Not for everyone, in fact, some are calling for stricter standards and default settings. I have to say that these people have a point, even though I fundamentally disagree with it. The truth is that the goal posts have shifted. Privacy is certainly not what it was a generation ago. The problem our culture seems to have is even recognizing that the shift is going on, and then overreacting when it hits us in the face. Here is the dirty truth about privacy: most people don’t care.
Mr Zuckerberg was at least speaking plainly, unlike last December, when he wrote in an open letter that “our work to improve privacy continues today”. He failed to mention that, eight days later, it would turn six aspects of each user profile, including gender, location and the friends list, into “publicly available information”.
If Facebook users were allowed a free choice, they might well tick the box to accept anyway. His vision of the “open graph”, in which Facebook’s users engage more with websites they visit and applications they use because the services are tailored to them, has allure.
Facebook’s Social Graph API
I spent the better part of last week going over the extensive documentation for Facebook’s new social graph API. Discovering just how OPEN the default settings were was pretty shocking. It allows a website to access not only a person’s name but their email, address, birthday as well as their entire list of friends. That’s pretty dramatic. If only I were a savvy sick manipulating marketer I could have a field day with all that data.
And here I am looking at this radical approach to openness and privacy and realizing that we’ve now reached the crossroads between marketing and privacy. Marketers have spent the better part of a century trying to get the very same data that networks like Facebook and Foursquare now have on us. Who we are, who are friends are, what we like, what we consume, where we are, where we spend our money and how we do so?
I mean this is the holy grail of marketing segmentation. And yet, I couldn’t help but be turned off by the thought of that data being used for the wrong purposes. And yet knowing what I know about human nature I know that is exactly what will happen. I think people are in for a surprise in the coming months. They will soon be targeted with advertisements in ways that are so personal and so relevant that it is going to be severely off-putting.
But I think what bothers me most is our society’s total inability to actually have the conversation that we need to have about privacy. Let’s just talk about it: let us talk about what should and should not be off-limits. From my perspective, I actually have no problem with my privacy settings being wide open. That is because I am analyzing how I am marketed so that I can turn it around and help my clients think strategically about how to do it better. Or differently.
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Image Source: alancleaver_2000 on Flickr
