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Facebook: Marketers Are Your ‘Friends’
Facebook cannot be all that benign. There is a privacy issue - I am not an expert and would like to know if the scary stories about Facebook are true?
Read this for example this morning:Â
The social network’s new ad system delivers everything you say, do, and buy to marketers—with no opt out
And this was illuminating, too:
“…Â users may not react kindly to Facebook handing over their personal contacts to promote products. Facebook has run afoul of users before(BusinessWeek.com, 9/8/06), when it initially launched the news-feed features 14 months ago. Hundreds of thousands of Facebook users complained that those feeds, which simply highlighted information they supplied on their personal pages, were an invasion of privacy. Thousands of people e-mailed the company. They formed groups. Zuckerberg & Co. were unprepared for the backlash and responded by adding privacy controls.”
November 10th, 2007 at 11:01 am
Once bitten, twice shy. I don’t think I’ll be going to Facebook, I was wondering, but well the article has given me some food for thought.
Thanks.
November 12th, 2007 at 11:51 am
You should forget about privacy on Facebook. Their whole business model depends on keeping your personal information in their database. They probably have the largest database of so many people’s personal information, which is why Facebook is estimated to be worth around $15 billion. It’s a goldmine of profiling data, which they may sell to advertisers.
Try getting rid of your account. You can only deactivate it, which means your data will still be stored on Facebook servers. Here’s an excerpt from their privacy policy:
Changing or Removing Information
Access and control over most personal information on Facebook is readily available through the profile editing tools. Facebook users may modify or delete any of their profile information at any time by logging into their account. Information will be updated immediately. Individuals who wish to deactivate their Facebook account may do so on the My Account page. Removed information may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time but will not be generally available to members of Facebook.
http://www.facebook.com/policy.php
They don’t want to lose your data and will try their hardest to retain it. To fully delete your account you have to make a request by contacting their help desk and they will tell you that you have to manually delete every comment, post, friend, etc. That’s next to impossible unless you want to spend days or even weeks trying to hunt down everything comment and post that you have made on Facebook. Once you have deleted everything, you have to contact them and they will supposedly delete your account but who knows if that actually happens.
In my opinion, there’s no such thing as privacy on the internet. You inadvertently disclose so much information by just surfing the web, writing and commenting on blogs, running a site, having accounts on various websites, using email, shopping on the net that it’s almost futile to have any desires of privacy while using the net. But with applications like Facebook it gets even worse. I don’t really care about my privacy anymore so I still have an account.
May 7th, 2008 at 3:19 am
I personally agree to Astrate…:)