There has been a lot of debate over the past few days regarding Facebook’s new social features and how they impact privacy. Many privacy advocates have come out against Facebook settings for a good reason — users have to opt-out by default.
On the web, users have gotten used to opt-in services. That is, they can voluntarily choose to receive information, rather than be forced to receive information.
For example — I can’t send an email newsletter to contacts in my address book. They have to sign-up to receive this email.
With Facebook, it’s the opposite — by default, anytime a user interacts with a product or brand, some of their information is made available to advertisers and publishers. In order to stop this from happening, they have to edit the privacy settings.
While some people consider this a breach of privacy, advertisers and publishers see it differently.
Being a publisher and marketer, these new Facebook policies help me expand my reach in ways that wasn’t possible earlier.
For example, you might have noticed that the Facebook ‘share’ button on this site has now been replaced with the ‘like’ button. While I’m not collecting any user information, anytime someone ‘likes’ a post, the post information as well as the URL of the site is automatically published to a user’s Facebook feed, which is Facebook’s most valuable real-estate.
Similarly, with these new enhancements, Facebook becomes an even more attractive tool for advertisers. If you’ve advertised on Facebook, you’ll know that you can really drill down and target a very specific audience.
Very few advertising platforms offer marketers the ability to reach a highly targeted audience. The only company that has come close thus far is Google and they’ve done exceedingly well.
For a majority of the consumers, I don’t foresee this being a problem. However, for those users that actively modify privacy settings, I would highly recommend modifying these settings to ensure that none of your information is made available to a site that you’re not comfortable with.
