Facebook And The Escalating Privacy Wars
August 9th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Just about the last trick that any company wants to perform is the abrupt about-face, a course reversal on a recently instituted feature, product, or policy. It’s the corporate equivalent of eating shoe leather, all right. Just ask the folks at Facebook, who put a “greater customer control” spin on revisions to their privacy options, only to finally heed the accurate public assessment: the default settings in the revised privacy controls made more data publicly accessible, not less.
In the May 22, 2010 issue of The Economist, this raised the charge that “online privacy is being trampled underfoot as internet behemoths race to grab as much data as possible…The worst thing is Facebook’s underlying prejudice against privacy. Sign up and it assumes that you want to share as much data as possible; if not, you have to change the settings, which can be a fiddly business.”
To a sophisticated user base, this is an open invitation to drop the service entirely. And to those of us who rely heavily on Facebook and its kin for our social marketing strategies, there is real danger of reduced scope for our campaigns. After all, a smaller user base means we reach fewer people, and ultimately pay more for each customer or client acquisition. Ultimately, although we need accurate and comprehensive information to increase our Return On Investment, it’s our job to keep the social networking sites honest. If not, we run the risk of losing one of the most successful channels in the history of Internet marketing.
