More dangerous is allowing third-party applications to keep a permanent record of your data.
“Imagine all your data — preferences, location, what you are thinking — being available to spammers, identity thieves or direct marketers. Or even big companies like banks for that matter,” says Mishra.
Besides, how secure is the data which these third-party application developers collect? “In my experience, third-party developers have a far worse track record of protecting user privacy than Facebook itself,” points out Arvind Narayanan, who is doing research on privacy issues at the Stanford
University.
Value of information
So why is Facebook doing all this? Well, it stands to gain a lot from Open Graph and the other new tools it has introduced. For example, a lot of data will be generated in Community Pages. When this becomes searchable, it will drive traffic to Facebook.
Facebook has also introduced a ‘Like’ button. Various websites can have this button on their pages. If you like an article you read or a game you played you simply click on the ‘Like’ button if it’s there on the page. From a user’s perspective, she is just sharing what she likes with her friends. Facebook, on the other hand, is building up a database of what the user likes and will eventually serve ads to her based on the ‘likes’.
“So far companies like Yahoo! have been trying to show us ads based on our behaviour, but it is difficult because they have to
deduce our behaviour. Facebook, on the other hand, already has our profile information, our location, and interests. So it is going to become easier for them to target ads to us. Now on a real-time basis they know what we like across the Web,” explains Mishra.
Marketers have already started benefiting from the changes. Asfaq Tapia, head of social media, Epigram Advertising, which promotes Bollywood films, is one of them.
“We create pages on Facebook dedicated to our films and users can become fans of those pages. After the changes Facebook made, the number of fans for one of the films, Khelien Hum Jee Jaan Sey, shot up overnight simply because people happened to mention it in their ‘interests’ and got automatically pulled into a community page. This wouldn’t happen earlier,” says Tapia, who now has many more Facebook users and people on their friends list to target with the film’s promotion. It’s ironic that many of these people became ‘fans’ of the movie without really intending to.
When he puts on the hat of a Facebook user, however, Tapia is worried. “From a place meant for users, it has become a place for marketers,” says Tapia, who has stopped listing anything in the ‘interest’ section of his profile since it gets linked to community pages as well as advertisements on Facebook.
Facing a backlash
Facebook is on the verge of crossing the 500 million user mark, and the company has been aware for some time now of the value of the vast user information on the site which can be monetised. But for this to happen, the information you give Facebook must be public. So, in December last year Facebook made much of your profile information public by default — this includes your name, photographs, names of your friends, and the city you live in.
This paved the way for changes introduced last month where your public information was shared with Facebook partners as part of Open Graph. And of course, once personal information becomes public, it becomes easier to profile users and serve them ads according to their interests, location, etc.
However, the company is now facing a huge backlash with 14 privacy advocacy groups filing a complaint with the US Federal Trade Commission against Facebook last week. The FTC is now taking a close look at how online social networks are using people’s data. This has made the top brass at Facebook go into a huddle and the company is expected to announce changes in its privacy policies later this week.
Vaibhav Malelo, an IT professional based in the US doesn’t mind the myriad privacy options so much. “It’s OK if they want to allow such customisation. But if they add something new (privacy setting) and by default it is ON (set to share the data) then there is a problem. I wouldn’t want it that way.”
Rahul Mehra* found out from personal experience what problems such an arbitary change in privacy settings can cause. “I had set my privacy settings in a way that none of my family members could have access to photos in which I was tagged. Recently, I went to a brewery in Pune with my friends. The pictures were uploaded on Facebook, but they became visible to family members. Now they know I have a girlfriend and that I have a great liking for beer. It wasn’t very comfortable at home,” he says.
Mehra, a savvy user, at least knew how to rectify the problem. A vast majority of Facebook users simply don’t have the knowhow or time to find and turn off these settings.
Of course, another way of looking at the issue is, ‘Don’t put stuff on your social network that you wouldn’t want your mother to see.’ After all, should we even expect to keep secrets in an online social world?
But the question is of breaching the user’s trust. Twitter makes it
clear that everything you post is accessible to the whole world, unless you choose to keep your tweets private. At the other end is email, where conversation by default is restricted between you and the recipients of your email. But what if Google or Yahoo! or Hotmail decide suddenly to make all our emails public?
Facebook started off by saying that you could share stuff with friends whom you chose. Today, much of your data is available to people who are not your friends as well as to companies who have become partners of Facebook. Sure, there are benefits to such a move: It will help in funneling relevant information to me based on my likes and what my friends like. The problem is that for those who choose not to share their data it’s hard to opt out, and harder still to keep track of the various ways in which the data is being accessed and used.
*Name changed on reques
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