Facebook: We're All More Naked than We Thought. And Somebody's Always At The Peephole. - Tom Cunniff

quotIf you39re not paying for something you39re not the customer You39re the product being soldquot amp8211 Andrew LewisI39ve always assumed that posting anything on a social network is an inherently public act No matter what the privacy agreements say it39s best to assume that on the Internet we39re fairly naked even if we39re not Scarlett JohanssonA good rule of thumb never post anything online or say something in an email that you wouldn39t want your Mom or your boss to seeBut the latest Facebook changes are far more invasive than many people may realize With these changes Facebook is changing the rules of social media and not for the betterThe New Rules of Social MediaRule 1 We39re all more naked than we ever realizedRule 2 Somebody is ALWAYS at the peepholeAs Dave Winer said quotPeople joke that privacy is over but I don39t think they imagined that the disclosures would be so proactive They are seeking out information to report about youquotIf you connect quotRead Watch Listenquot apps to your Facebook account they will automatically send a link to anything that you read without you taking an actionLet that sink in ANYTHING you read see or listen to WITHOUT you taking an actionThat39s very different than you quotLikingquot an article or posting a link Facebook will tell people what you read without any commentary from you It suggests you quotLikequot the article even if you think it39s the most moronic thing you39ve ever seenAs Ben Parr at Mashable puts it quotWe39re at the point of no return Facebook39s passive sharing will change how we live our lives More and more the things we do in real life will end up as Facebook posts and even if it39s being posted just to our friends it only takes one friend to share that information with his or her friends to start a viral chain Sharing with just your friends doesn39t protect your privacyquotThe Giants at the PeepholeAnything you can say about Facebook privacy probably applies to Google And Google already has data on everything you39ve ever searched for and has read your Google MailDid you know Twitter Google and Facebook track your visits to any web page that uses quotFollowquot quot1quot or Like buttons amp8211 whether you ever click those buttons or not And that logging out of Facebook isn39t enoughNielsen39s exclusive partnership with Facebook Online Campaign Ratings gives them access to Facebook39s extraordinary wealth of data about consumers39 online behavior Facebook has the largest Hadoop cluster in the world 30 Petabytes as of March 2011 That39s 3000 times bigger than the Library of CongressDon39t Worry Be Happy The Counterarguments quotBut there39s no personally identifiable informationquot True Facebook anonymizes the ad viewership data it collects It doesn39t tell Nielsen you specifically saw an ad It adds you to a demographic group eg agelocationgender and ships that grouped and anonymized data to NielsenIt39s true that quotmale married jolly white beard owns reindeer lives at the North Pole works Christmas Evequot isn39t PII But it39s also true that any 5 year old could guess who we39re talking about quotBut you optedin to all of this data collection when you authorized the appquot True but the optins are typically buried in long EULAs Many of these optins are not explicit Were you surprised the first time you went to a publisher39s web site and saw your Facebook picture I was I didn39t think quotYep I remember authorizing thatquot And going back to an earlier point how many consumers do you think understand that Twitter Google and Facebook track their visits to any web page that uses quotFollowquot quot1quot or quotLikequot My guess is the number is very close to zeroDoes Privacy Have To Lose For Advertising To WinDigital has invested a fortune chasing the dream of knowing exactly who we39re advertising to exactly when they39re in the market and exactly what message to deliver to ensure that they buy the right brand I worry that our industry shares a sort of unspoken agreement quotMaybe the erosion of privacy is sort of creepy But it39s a total win for advertisers soquotI think it39s time we start questioning that assumption and not just because of its slippery moralityAs an exercise let39s set the morality question aside entirely for a moment Is it really a winIf we39re not quite at the end of the privacy invasion rainbow we can see it from here Soamp8230 where39s the gold If all of this really worked wouldn39t we know it by now Shouldn39t clickthrough rates be climbing like crazy Shouldn39t online CPMs be skyrocketing Shouldn39t we see junk email and CPA deals disappearing in favor of personalized advertising Where are all the efficiencies we39ve been talking about Shouldn39t we be seeing CPG marketers diverting more and more money from TV to digitalIf having so much data about our customers was the nirvana we39ve been promised we should be watching these numbers climb inexorably higher every year But they39re not Every one of the key indicators is flat or fallingIt39s time to start asking some harder questionsDoes privacy really have to lose for advertising to winAre we ready to question the assumption that for brand advertising more data guarantees better resultsAt what point do brands have a moral obligation to start saying noTom Cunniff began his career as a copywriter at traditional agencies founded an interactive agency in 1994 and now works on the marketing side creating and integrating traditional and interactive All of Tom39s opinions are entirely his own Tom can be reached at tomcunniffnycgmailcomRead all Tom39s MediaBizBloggers commentaries at Radical Common SenseCheck us out on Facebook at MediaBizBloggerscomFollow our Twitter updates MediaBizBloggerThe opinions and points of view expressed in this commentary are exclusively the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaBizBloggerscom management or associated bloggers MediaBizBloggers is an open thought leadership platform 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Facebook: We're All More Naked than We Thought. And Somebody's Always At The Peephole. - Tom Cunniff

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