Are We Just Products For Advertisers?
Facebook is proud to ‘help you connect and share with the people in your life’. Alas, these people can also include your worst enemies. 
With more than a tenth of the world’s population linked on Facebook, alarm is growing about the uses to which people’s information can be put. It’s not just advertisers seeking to target products and employers checking out the true lives of new recruits. Facebook data is also turning up in court cases, very much to users’ detriment.
For litigants the site is a goldmine of possibilities, for the things that some users post about themselves are frankly reckless. In one case, a 28-year-old Canadian who claimed he had lost his social life as a result of a car accident was found to have posted photographs of himself hosting parties. In another, a woman boasted online of her penchant for sado-masochistic sex and illicit drugs, a boon for her ex husband who used it to help win custody of their child.
Users are in a weak position to protest, because they aren’t the customers – they’re the product. “Boardroom discussions at Facebook are not about how to help little Johnny make more and better friendships online; they are about how Facebook can monetise Johnny’s ‘social graph’,” points out author Douglas Rushkoff. Facebook’s real customers are the companies who pay them for this data and use it to help them sell us their products, he says.
But the perception is growing that Facebook is being less than honest about its use of personal data. In Europe the company has faced an online campaign, started by an Irish citizen who was incensed when he discovered that it still held reams of controversial personal data which he was certain he had deleted.
Users may yet be saved by officialdom. In the US Facebook has just settled federal charges that it violated users’ privacy by getting people to share more information than they agreed to when they signed up. It must now let independent auditors review its privacy practices for the next two years, and consult users before changing its data policy again. The European Union meanwhile has plans to clamp down on the use by social networking sites of information on users’ sexuality, religious beliefs and location.
It remains to be seen what the effects will be, if any. Yet the pressure on Facebook to squeeze profit from users’ data can only grow. The company is expected to pull in an estimated $4 billion in worldwide ad revenue this year, and this could go up to $6 billion in 2012. For the moment its goal has been to keep growing, but if it soon goes public, as expected, it will have to satisfy shareholders’ expectations of profits. The battlelines are being drawn for what is likely to be a protracted and messy conflict.
(From Social Business, Q4, 2011)
