Especially when the data that Facebook, its partner sites and others collect have unforeseeable consequences in this catch-as-catch-can (privacy-wise) country. Orbitz has become notorious for doing this all by its lonesome self—offering substantially higher prices on a repeated search in the assumption that I’ve had no luck elsewhere—but the ham-fisted way it does this will simply lead someone who experiences this and is not totally insensate to abandon it (or to diversify his searches to different sites lest they all do this).
This by Facebook, however, will surely cause greater, yea, even institutional damage:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/
Followed a month later by this from Facebook’s Instagram division:
http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/18/instagram-speaks-out-on-users-concerns-about-tos-changes-will-have-more-to-share-soon/
“Instagram’s suicide note” is not an understatement. The Facebook couples pages reward people who merely selected “In a relationship” or “Married” in their profiles and friended their SOs with views of their lives as seen through the lens of a divorce detective. But in the Instagram fiasco, anyone who has ever uploaded anything that he would not care to share with the public at large is immediately exposed to harm, in some cases even career- or life-threatening harm. And this is not even the first time that Facebook used an opt-out approach instead of an opt-in only to have to flee an immediate backlash.
Facebook has been successful at getting extensive personal data, session minutes (face time) and stickiness out of users by stealth—it’s all cosy social interaction and not the slightest reminder of its ultimate costs. But there are costs, and two of them, a month apart, have now slammed into many of these users at high speed. At a minimum, those of them who are not completely asleep will be careful before touching any Facebook controls anywhere. At a maximum, they will leave at once and never come back. Social networks are actually not new, and history shows that they should not take for granted even users driven to them by the network effects of also having many of their “friends” there. Prodigy, Delphi, AOL, anyone?
Which again leads one to wonder what the people who thought up these insanely risky and revenue-inconsequential features were thinking. The probable answer is that they weren’t. Perhaps decaffeinated drinks should be banned in the workplace. Perhaps, too, companies should stick to their knitting, especially when they’ve already successfully IPOed and all else is whatever the opposite of gravy is.
Facebook isn’t a bad idea (though you might not know it from the press coverage). I use it increasingly more. I’ve learned how to work around its shortcomings (the ads are helpfully on the right, where the window’s right boundary can be moved to hide them). But its real value to those of us without much disposable time (those gainfully employed) is in staying in touch, more or less intensively, with the relatively few people with whom we wish to have this kind of interaction. Leave us alone, we say, and nobody gets hurt (and you can even make some money on the side). Spectacular growth by chewing through the huge numbers of schoolchildren and getting people to “friend” everyone they know because it’s the cool thing to do (even if no words are ever exchanged afterwards) is, of course, unsustainable. Similarly, getting adults to immolate their privacy despite overt and objectionable results is unreliable (some will do it anyway but they have relatively little disposable income). Far better to have Facebook and its partners mine the same HTTP cookie and quietly adjust all their advertising, in compliance with vague TOS language and with almost no-one the wiser. No coolness factor but, with behavioural targeting being the main and sorely undersupplied justification for high Web advertising CPMs, all profit.
Had one drunk one’s coffee, one would not have needed to be hit by a plummeting share price to understand that.
http://online.wsj.com/article/
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