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Should Facebook Users Worry About Ad Snooping?
from the probably-not dept
The New York Times's Bits blog points us to an interview with Esther Dyson in which she raises questions about the way social networking sites (especially Facebook) are planning use customers' data. She seems like she might be lumping together two different issues that ought to be kept separate. If she's simply saying that Facebook should get permission before sharing private user data with advertisers, it's hard to argue with that. But she seems to be making the broader claim that Facebook shouldn't even use private information to choose ads on its own site without getting the user's permission first. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. The information is already on Facebook's servers, so it's not likely to create new security risks to have the advertising algorithm take the information into account. Moreover, targeted ads can be chosen without ever giving advertisers access to anybody's private information. A shoe store might, for example, ask to have its advertising displayed to every Facebook user who's under 35, female, and within 50 miles of the 63105 area code. The shoe store would never get a list of Facebook users who met that criteria, nor would they be given the specific age or zip code of people who click on the ad. Rather, Facebook's own software would automatically display those ads and then bill the shoe store based on the number of impressions or clicks that were generated.
Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.
