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Dec. 4, 2007 at 11:41am
Facebook Beacon: Social Media Becomes Spyware
Advertising Gone Wrong
I've been a Facebook user for quite some time - even before they had the facebook.com domain. One thing that I absolutely love about it is the control they give you to limit what other people see about you. I've adopted a very serious set of controlls that limits only people I actually know to see anything about me. However, this is a false sense of security. Everything I post online that anyone besides me can access is inherently public. This is what initially drew myself and countless other people to Facebook.
However, their new advertising platform - Beacon - throws all this out the window. Beacon is a system that allows Facebook to track what you do on other websites. Let me reiterate that: Facebook tracks what you do online. They don't just track what you say you like on your profile, for example what movies you like; with Beacon they can track what movies you're actually renting.
This is a marketer's dream come true. Facebook has millions of users, all happily entering what movies they like, what books they read, what they like to do, and what music they listen to. From there, it's trivial to create user profiles. They can determine that 35% of white males between 18 and 25 like to listen to Led Zeppelin. I just made those figures up, however I can see that more people like Jack Johnson than Coldplay in my college network. Putting numbers on that would be simple for Facebook.
So Facebook has all this data, but what are they going to do with it? If you're thinking, "sell it", you're probably right. They are sitting on a gold mine of information. Anyone with an interest in data mining would be cackling with glee if they got their hands on that info. This all leads to better profiling and better marketing schemes with the ultimate goal of getting you to buy more stuff you don't need.
Coming back to Beacon, they are now able to track what you do on just about any site on the internet. They can see what you buy, what you rent, what games you play, and if you're getting your girlfriend an engagement ring. Even though Facebook recently changed Beacon's reporting mechanism on their site (you now have to actively approve stories for them to show up), they are still collecting that data. It just isn't published.
The conclusion that follows is somewhat disturbing: Facebook may be great at making an adversiting platform, but they're not so great when it comes to their user's privacy. Their concern is obvious: to serve the needs of advertisers while paying lip service to "what the users want" - information about what their friends are doing. They're assuming that their ends of providing good advertising justifies the means where they invade the user's privacy to a degree not seen before on the internet. And as I learned from philosophy, the result of your actions does not justify any unethical decisions you had to make to get there.
That's why I'm blocking Beacon, removing all my interests and likes from the site, and most other personal information I put up there. I don't like people snooping into my information, and I won't make it easy for them. They probably have a profile on that, too.
Posted in Deep Thoughts, Odds 'n Ends, Review, Security by Dave Poole
Comments (1)
Thank goodness I can still see all of your private info on myspace!
1 | Left by Michael | Dec. 7, 2007 at 3:16pm