Calm Down - Facebook is Not The End of Privacy
Thursday, November 15th, 2007
Posted by Jenn Lowther
The CBC has just published and article by Jesse Hirsh that looks into Facebook’s new advertising platform, Beacon. Beacon allows advertisers to install a small piece of code on their website that allows Facebook to track their users on these third party sites. This information is then imported into Facebook through recommendations in your friend’s newsfeeds and on your profile page. For instance, if I go to Ebay and buy The Life of Pi, this information will be imported to Facebook and disseminated amongst my friends by letting them know I just made this purchase. This advertising mechanism leverages the powerful force of word-of-mouth advertising.
The CBC article casts a critical eye on these new advertising updates on Facebook, calling into question the potential for privacy erosion associated with extending Facebook’s ability to harvest user data across advertising partners’ websites. It goes on to speculate that this could be a precipice in Facebook’s phenomenal growth over the past year and that this innovative marketing tool could send Facebook’s user base flocking to other social networking sites that are not actively engaging in the sale of user information to advertising companies.
I personally feel that this development in Facebook’s advertising platform will be both beneficial for Facebook’s users as well as advertisers. It allows the advertising that we see on the internet to be highly targeted towards our personal interest, rather than getting a static banner advertisement that is displayed to everyone regardless of their interest in the subject matter.
All of the people who are jumping up and down fretting about the possible incursion into our privacy are more than likely the same people who decreed that email would mean the end of worker productivity. No matter what happens, somebody will find a way to take it too seriously.
