Privacy, Trust and You

Posted by Dave Ambrose on November 15th, 2007 2:30 PM

With the blog chatter surrounding privacy issues of Beacon, it makes me think back to my earlier post: perspective.  As Caroline McCarthy pointed out earlier this morning, Facebook SocialAds may not be “kosher.” Sure, there are some slippery slope questions to be answered about the rights of fans consenting to pages and the direct/indirect consequences following a Page addition but this shouldn’t be our primary focus in the early days of the Facebook internal testbed for advertising monetization. Over the next few months, perhaps Q1 2008, Facebook will begin to roll-out the international platform with Microsoft’s help.

I feel we are experiencing the privacy woes of Gmail all over again. A friend of mine in law school made an interesting argument:

“It’s borderline whether or not FB is violating its users’ right to publicity and there certainly a lot of arguments that it isn’t technically doing so [read: consent to FB's Terms of Service] but the obvious question is if it is borderline why alienate your users by doing something that they perceive violates their rights, regardless of whether a court perceives it in the same way?”

I’m a Facebook user because I trust what their doing in Palo Alto. Once it’s gone, the social graph breaks down and users will undoubtedly leave.

Posted in Analysis, Privacy
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