A few excerpts:
If you follow the money you will quickly determine that Facebook is not some kindly charity helping us reconnect with old friends. Facebook is all about making money.
At its heart, Facebook is actually a data mining company. And once they have data, they turn around and sell it.
Facebook is no different except that the amount and type of information that people share is much more personal and detailed. We think nothing about telling people here we are traveling to and how long we will be gone. We tell about romances, post pictures of children and share some of our most intimate thoughts.
Just remember, when you do this Facebook will sell your information. It will be sorted, categorized and sold to a variety of people. Some of them just want to sell you something. Others may not be nearly as up front or honorable in their intentions.
Given the vague and alarmist tone of the article, I decided to dig deeper. First I asked the author (who happens to be my brother) what the basis was for his contention that Facebook is basically a data mining company. His reply was similar to what the article said: follow the money. He pointed out that Facebook has a market capitalization of $20 billion even though it is not publicly traded. His conclusion was that a lot of money must be changing hands to support that kind of capitalization. Fair enough, but is data mining the only explanation for a lot of money changing hands?
Next, I went to Facebook to see what it says about how your personal information can be used. When it comes to companies, I believe that they will be as honest as they have to be. If a company like Facebook says one thing on their privacy policy and does another, they are inviting a class action lawsuit and there are plenty of hungry lawyers waiting to take them down. Here is what Facebook says about how they use your personal information:
We never share your personal information with our advertisers. Facebook's ad targeting is done entirely anonymously. If advertisers select demographic targeting for their ads, Facebook automatically matches those ads to the appropriate audience. Advertisers only receive anonymous data reports.
Some select partner sites may access your information to personalize your experience as soon as you arrive, but only information that's already visible to everyone. You can turn off instant personalization for specific sites or you can turn it off completely from the Applications and Websites page. This will prevent these partners from receiving your information through instant personalization, including what's visible to everyone.
5. How We Use Your Information
We use the information we collect to try to provide a safe, efficient, and customized experience. Here are some of the details on how we do that:
To manage the service. We use the information we collect to provide our services and features to you, to measure and improve those services and features, and to provide you with customer support. We use the information to prevent potentially illegal activities, and to enforce our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. We also use a variety of technological systems to detect and address anomalous activity and screen content to prevent abuse such as spam. These efforts may on occasion result in a temporary or permanent suspension or termination of some functions for some users.
To contact you. We may contact you with service-related announcements from time to time. You may opt out of all communications except essential updates on your account notifications page. We may include content you see on Facebook in the emails we send to you.
To serve personalized advertising to you. We don’t share your information with advertisers without your consent. (An example of consent would be if you asked us to provide your shipping address to an advertiser to receive a free sample.) We allow advertisers to choose the characteristics of users who will see their advertisements and we may use any of the non-personally identifiable attributes we have collected (including information you may have decided not to show to other users, such as your birth year or other sensitive personal information or preferences) to select the appropriate audience for those advertisements. For example, we might use your interest in soccer to show you ads for soccer equipment, but we do not tell the soccer equipment company who you are. You can see the criteria advertisers may select by visiting our advertising page. Even though we do not share your information with advertisers without your consent, when you click on or otherwise interact with an advertisement there is a possibility that the advertiser may place a cookie in your browser and note that it meets the criteria they selected.
To serve social ads. We occasionally pair advertisements we serve with relevant information we have about you and your friends to make advertisements more interesting and more tailored to you and your friends. For example, if you connect with your favorite band’s page, we may display your name and profile photo next to an advertisement for that page that is displayed to your friends. We only share the personally identifiable information visible in the social ad with the friend who can see the ad. You can opt out of having your information used in social ads on this help page.
To supplement your profile. We may use information about you that we collect from other Facebook users to supplement your profile (such as when you are tagged in a photo or mentioned in a status update). In such cases we generally give you the ability to remove the content (such as allowing you to remove a photo tag of you) or limit its visibility on your profile.
To make suggestions. We use your profile information, the addresses you import through our contact importers, and other relevant information, to help you connect with your friends, including making suggestions to you and other users that you connect with on Facebook. For example, if another user imports the same email address as you do, we may suggest that you connect with each other. If you want to limit your visibility in suggestions we make to other people, you can adjust your search visibility privacy setting, as you will only be visible in our suggestions to the extent you choose to be visible in public search listings. You may also block specific individual users from being suggested to you and you from being suggested to them.
To help your friends find you. We allow other users to use contact information they have about you, such as your email address, to find you, including through contact importers and search. You can prevent other users from using your email address to find you using the search section of your privacy settings.
Downloadable Software. Certain downloadable software applications and applets that we offer, such as our browser toolbars and photo uploaders, transmit data to us. We may not make a formal disclosure if we believe our collection of and use of the information is the obvious purpose of the application, such as the fact that we receive photos when you use our photo uploader. If we believe it is not obvious that we are collecting or using such information, we will make a disclosure to you the first time you provide the information to us so that you can decide whether you want to use that feature.
Memorializing Accounts. If we are notified that a user is deceased, we may memorialize the user’s account. In such cases we restrict profile access to confirmed friends, and allow friends and family to write on the user’s Wall in remembrance. We may close an account if we receive a formal request from the user’s next of kin or other proper legal request to do so.
I realize that this is a lot to digest. The volume of the privacy policy cuts both ways. On the one hand, Facebook has gone out of their way to tell you the limits on how they will use your information. On the other hand, the length of policy shows that they have spent a lot of time thinking about how to use your information.
Here is my take away from all this. Facebook acts as a buffer between its users and its advertisers. It collects data on its members and sells the general characteristics of the data to its advertisers without disclosing the specific aspects of its members. In the example given, if an advertiser wanted to direct an ad to soccer enthusiasts, Facebook could route that ad to people who have identified soccer as an interest, but the advertiser would not know who the soccer enthusiasts were.
There are two ways that outsiders can get the personal information. One is technology failure. If an unethical employee copies personal information and sells it or if a hacker exploits a hole in the security, a third party could take advantage of the mountains of private information within Facebook. The second way is if an advertiser or an app requests permission to access the user's profile and the user clicks yes without thinking of the implications. So, you can have your information stolen or you can voluntarily disclose your information. How is that any different than in the real world? A private detective sifting through your trash can obtain a lot of personal information. That is similar to the data breach scenario. Also, people give out lots of personal information about themselves offline, especially if alcohol is involved.
I think that the bottom line is that the privacy issues are essentially the same whether in Facebook or the real world. If you would not deposit documents with your bank account number and social security number in the garbage, you should not post similar information online. Just as you would not tell a new friend that you met at the bar that you were embezzling from your employer, you should not post that information on Facebook. If you do, you deserve what you get.
Your Name
Profile Picture
Networks
However, the seriously private can avoid these limitations by registering under a pseudonym, using a profile picture that is not personal to them and not signing up for any networks. For example, I am friends with Bishop Barbie. Bishop Barbie is not a real person. She is a satire on the Evangelical Lutheran Church and her profile picture is a Barbie doll dressed in bishop’s robes. This particular user hides behind complete privacy because he/she does not use his/her own name or photo.
Anything else on Facebook is subject to privacy settings, which can be set to: everyone, friends of friends and friends. For me, I allow everyone to see my status, posts, bios and favorite quotations. I don’t post anything to these areas that I don’t want the world to see. Everything else is set to friends only.
Photos are a touchy area. If photos are of family members only, I restrict those albums to designated family members. If someone requests that I not tag their photos with their identity, I respect this. However, if I were to tag someone’s photo in spite of their request, Facebook gives them the right to delete the tag.
Based on all this, I don’t buy the argument that Facebook is an insidious data mining operation selling your personal information to people who want to invade your privacy. I think there are other answers for its value. When you create a platform with as many users as Facebook has, there is tremendous value there. I think that a lot of Facebook’s theoretical market capitalization is based on its potential rather than its current operations. Facebook is expanding the sale of credits which can be used to play games on its site with the hope of creating its own mini-banking system much like Paypal. Facebook has been very succesful in attracting large numbers of users. Where there are a large number of eyes on the screen, there is the potential for making money.
I want to return to the article’s conclusion:
So the next time you think about posting something on Facebook, remember that you are being watched by the world.I think this is a valid point and my next post will be when you cross the line of TMI (too much information).
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