So you have added hundreds of people to your Facebook account, from your closest friends to vague acquaintances or even people you have never met. You interact with them on topics that interest you, you post, tweet and twitter to make sure everyone knows you exist or just for the fun of it. You play some games or do quizzes; the ones that compare you to animals or famous people. Innocent stuff, right? Maybe.
Facebook knows your employer, education, sexual orientation, friends and your interests. You use FB on your iPhone as well and thanks to the GPS in your phone everyone is aware of your whereabouts. And these quizzes you take? They are neatly packaged psychological tests that try to glean information about you, thereby taking profiling to the next level. Using behavioral analytics, all this data is being compared with three hundred million people (a user-base the size of the entire population of the US) to find patterns. Knowing who is like you, they now can fairly accurately predict what is next. In essence they create a model of you and use this to target advertising. Moreover, they can aggregate information over all these users and apply “social sensors” to see if tastes or moods are changing among certain groups. This is powerful knowledge…People who are more cynical than me can probably come up with some horror scenarios.
According to ACLU, California’s Civil Liberties organization, most people don’t know that Facebook's default privacy settings allow full access to a user's information. It is actually worse.. every time one of a user's friends takes a quiz, the quiz has access to that user's profile information. Of course that has not gone unnoticed and some users sued FB, alleging that the social networking site violates several state laws aimed at protecting consumers' privacy. According to the WSJ, the complaint accuses FB of failing to compensate its users for harvesting their personal data and for violating laws that protect consumers from having information they upload to the site shared with third parties, such as advertisers. Hopefully Facebook will strengthen the privacy of personal data, but it seems that the floodgates have opened.
Interestingly, when I talk to my kids they are not that concerned. They have grown up with Facebook and actually use it as a tool to position themselves, to basically promote the “brand me”. They have become incredibly clever in manipulating the way they are being perceived from their Facebook presence. It of course begs the question what is the reality content of what they post? As Daniel Hollinger writes in an excellent article in today’s WSJ: “it's getting harder to know what's real and unreal in a world that always seems to be slipping slightly out of focus.” Probably, the word “reality” itself has lost its meaning a while back when the Dutch Endemol group launched the first reality show, aptly named “Big Brother”.
