Saturday 10 November, 2007 at 10:09:19 pm
filed under web
For the Facebook crowd:
Facebook just announced a new advertising scheme. You have, no doubt, already noticed the targeted advertising (Yes, I played water polo once; no, for the love of God, I don’t want to meet other water-polo-playing singles), but this new system is even more invasive. From their own website:
Social Ads are more likely to influence users when they appear next to a story about a friend’s interaction with your business [...] Facebook Social Ads allow your businesses to become part of people’s daily conversations.
And a picture:
(both from the FB Business solutions section).
Privacy advocates are (rightfully) going nuts, but the fact is you’ve already agreed to let them do this. From the Terms of Use:
By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.
Or in English, “Facebook owns everything you’ve ever done on or uploaded to their site”.
A little scary, and an excellent argument in favor of a distributed social network (more on this later), but the fact is there’s an easy way out: don’t give any product endorsements on Facebook. Don’t use iLike, don’t add movie applications or join sponsored groups, and advertisers won’t know you exist. Hell, maybe privacy concerns will even force people (my sister) to clean up their cluttered profiles.
Because you know it’s too late to just ditch Facebook.
Taylor
on Friday 25 January, 2008 at 11:29:36 pm
Yeah you definitely have to use a fake birthday and posting a pic of yourself is asking to get destroyed…. they can post my profile pick all they want its just a desktop screenshot…
That’s not even that bad the real problem lies in the abstraction they do they pretend to give you more security when in reality companies can still rip all your info and your friends and sort it…. also the apps can easily spam to groups and friends… It really wouldn’t be hard to write a spider spamming app.