PC World magazine has a good summary of the whole saga, along with interviews with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, who was about to lodge a formal 25-page complaint with the Federal Trade Commission before Facebook said it would revert to its old terms. Excecutive director Marc Rotenberg said: "We've been in this situation before with other companies that have really dug in their heels and tried to fight it out in the courts and the media. I think Facebook did the right thing."
Another interesting point from Rotenberg is how Facebook is meant to make money. Of course, it's with our data.
One new concern already on the horizon comes with Facebook's updated advertising models. The site is now utilizing APIs [application program interfaces] to pull user data off of status updates, Rotenberg says, then use it within ads placed on the page.
"People ... who care about privacy on Facebook typically don’t install applications, because they know that applications are pulling down a lot of their data. But if you're not installing applications and you learn that the information that you're putting in your status updates is being provided for advertising, you might be a little upset," Rotenberg says.
Source: PC World
Couple that with the column from Reuters; where the author discusses how Facebook, a private company, needs to make money through advertising, which is possibly at odds with people's privacy expectations. MySpace is not as popular these days as Facebook, but its garish straight-up advertising (which it does not need to spell out) - and its profitability - make it a good model for social networks.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDelete