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September 5, 2007
Facebook Offers Warning Period Before Letting the Spiders In
The buzz today: Facebook is opening up user profiles to search by non-members and, starting next month, indexing by public search engines. Facebook users can opt out, or tune the information they're willing to provide to non-users.
Reuters prefers to characterize the change as "let[ting] users tell the rest of the world how to find them on the site," which suggests Facebook's flacks did an admirable job of framing the matter as one of adding a feature.
Om Malik is less sure it's a gift, and points to an article that appeared on ZDNet last week which considers businesses that specialize in gathering up the little bits and pieces each social networking site lets slip to create a more complete profile of everyone who participates. They then sell that information in ways that might not occur to people who don't regularly think in demographic terms, and in a manner that's within the letter of their privacy policies:
In other words, Rapleaf sweeps up all the publicly available but sometimes hard-to-get information it can find about you on the Web, via social networks, other sites and, soon to be added, blogs. At the other end of the business, TrustFuse packages information culled from sites in a profile and sells the profile to marketers. All three companies appear to operate within the scope of their stated privacy policies, which say they do "not sell, rent or lease e-mail addresses to third parties."
And that's right. Marketers bring TrustFuse their own list of e-mail addresses to buy access to demographic, behavioral and Internet usage data on those people, according to the company's privacy policy and sales documents.
Malik takes the right tone here: Facebook has announced its new policy and has provided a clear enough way to opt out, so hysterics are not in order. On the other hand, Facebook has also provided another opportunity to think about what its policy, and others like it, mean in the bigger picture.
Even if you're one of those people who's sort of pleased that your "voice" is being heard as part of an aggregate of consumer data and don't happen to be troubled by the kind of information sharing that ZDNet article discusses, you still might want to consider the implications in terms of two things:
How easy it is for the information aggregators to get the information they have without violating any privacy policies or laws.
How many large collections of information you care to be a part of.
The aggregators may just be figuring out ways to target you for the best coupons, but that doesn't mean they'll always have perfect control of the information they've amassed.
Posted by mhall at 4:24 PM | Add Comment
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