Privacy - a problem for Facebook and web 2.0?

In my last post, I talked about people clicking on ads when it is relevant to them. Achieving this relevance is difficult, especially as you have to do so whilst still respecting an individual’s privacy. Facebook realised what can happen when you do not respect an individual’s privacy when it launched the Facebook Beacon. It allowed purchasing habits from Facebook’s partners to be given to Facebook and publicised to their friends and family through the newsfeed. They backtracked (see previous post), but not completely. It is interesting to see that based on the reduction in outcry over Facebook Beacon following the changes, the individual is willing to allow Facebook to have knowledge about their purchase habits as long as they do not tell their friends and colleagues.

I do not think this will stand the test of time, Facebook will surely end up having to allow users to remove this info if they wish. In the UK at least, an individual can request that a company ceases to use information for the purpose of direct marketing.

The question then becomes whether banners and search ads are direct marketing..

and whether Facebook is liable under UK law.

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apophenia wrote an article about “who clicks on ads? and what might this mean” which talks about that common phrase from people - “I never click on ads”. It then concludes that the majority of people clicking on ads online are from the lower socio-economic groups online, taking this conclusion from a study produced by AOL. Go here to read the full article.

AOL’s customer base has traditionally had a bias towards this demographic and this would certainly lead to them having a skew towards this demographic clicking on ads. Even more so, marketers advertising inside AOL seem to understand this and display banners suited to this demographic. Yet those same marketers do not seem to do this in the wider Internet. If this demographic is clicking in the majority on online ads, then surely the majority of agencies are wasting their client’s money online?

I don’t agree with this conclusion, not just because doing so would mean Google’s valuation would very quickly collapse

People do click on ads online, but they do so only when it is of interest to them (or to put it another way, when they benefit from clicking). Whether it is because they are in the market for a car and see a car ad they liked, or because they have seen a film trailer they want to find out more about. Marketers everywhere are trying to show an ad to the right person in the right place and at the right time. Achieve this and click-thru and economic returns would be sky high. This is why Google is doing so well, its technology is able to place adverts in front of you at a time when you are interested in a specific topic.

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In a previous post I said: over time things are slowly being removed from my blog and into facebook. Personal photo albums have gone, and it cant be long before video, books and last.fm disappear leaving my blog much more focussed on what it does best - delivering personal (or other’s) commentary. It’s slowly becoming less and less of a black hole for information about the author.

A couple of friends asked me why I didn’t move all content creation entirely into facebook?

I initially thought this was an easy one to answer - I import my posts into facebook as there is an audience there but that it was a closed environment. For it to be suitable, I needed to be able to deliver the content back out into aggregators using RSS. Except it turned out Facebook had this capability. You can see it here.

So why not use Facebook?

It came down to not feeling like the correct place - Facebook feels like a more personal arena - not really a place for business orientated content. I wonder if Facebook can make that perception change? Would I move then? Well they would need to be searchable on the open web - and I would want to be able to control layout more. Wouldn’t Facebook just turn into a proprietary version of the web if all that happened? That wouldn’t make sense to do, right? We already have one of those..

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