Facebook’s New Moves: Balancing Privacy with Profits

This is not the University of Arizona Mascot. It's just a Devil. And the Facebook logo. Make of it what you will...

Facebook is trying to take over the world/the internet/your life! Or at least, that’s the impression someone might get by perusing blogs, news aggregators and general web industry water cooler discussions.  With the implementation of their “Instant Personalization” feature, Facebook basically drew back the curtain on the amount of personal data they’re willing to share with other sites. Couple this with the brouhaha over their almost constant mis-steps and backtracking with regards to their privacy policies and it’s almost like Facebook can do no right.

On one hand, I understand their goals—Facebook is a free site that is sitting on an internet gold mine. All of the data that users blithely enter leave marketing and analytic folk drooling and is a great way to monetize an otherwise money-bleeding site (Ads can only do so much, after all). Additionally, the Instant Personalization feature seems like a well intentioned idea—enter your data once, in Facebook, and then let it do the heavy lifting to help some of our favorite sites (ie: Pandora and Yelp) provide us with a better user experience.

But while their goals maybe noble—or at least, not evil—most web denizens seem to feel like they’ve gone too far. In the past week, blogs have exploded with anti-Facebook sentiments. Some bemoan the ever increasing loss of privacy (this post contains an interesting infographic on the shift and this one discusses how hard it is to actually keep your profile private) while others discuss Facebook’s assertion that the age of privacy is over.  Facebook says this commotion is all a product of journalists stoking a non-existent fire, but a growing trend on Google shows people asking how to delete their Facebook account and protests have sprung up urging users unfamiliar with the issues at hand to kill their Facebook accounts.

Regardless if we’re moving towards a more open society or if Facebook is overstepping their corporate bounds, the discussions engendered about the role of social media is an interesting one. We here at Manning promote the use of Facebook for our clients as a tool to open untapped lanes of communication with their clients. We also love it as a means to promote events and keep people up to date with what is going on with the company.  However, in light of Facebook’s recent actions – including censoring inter-profile private messages—the onus is on us to be vigilant and make sure that the trade offs we’re encouraging our clients to make are worth the benefits offered from a Facebook profile. Since we here at Manning take your privacy seriously, you can be sure that we will be monitoring this closely for a while to come.