privacy

Facebook grooming us for intrusive marketing?

Whether or not Facebook kills its much-derided Beacon program, the controversy surrounding intrusive marketing surveillance deserves to flourish.

You remember the old story about the frog placed in a pot of water that was slowly heated up, until it was cooked? When I read the about Facebook's reaction to the anti-Beacon protests, my first impression is that Facebook's concessions are essentially along the lines of, "OK, we turned up the heat a bit too much on this one, so we'll turn it back down a little bit--for now." Are marketers counting on the fact that we'll get used to the warm bath, then the hot tub, calibrating their fine-tuned ability to stop just short of the lobster pot?

CNN.com contributes a story, "Ad targeting improves as Web sites track consumer habits," which covers the Facebook issue among other case studies. Marketers are studying the sensitivity level of consumers to intrusive advertising and adjusting their programs accordingly. For example, CNN.com reports, "Most Web sites and marketers have been shunning the ultimate targeting--ads that greet you by name. Yahoo could easily do that using registration information, but 'I'm not sure people would like that or not,' said Richard Frankel, Yahoo's senior director of product marketing."

The CNN story continues:

"Users' comfort with data profiling has indeed shifted over the years. Google faced criticism when it introduced an e-mail service that paired ads with the words inside private messages. Millions of people now use Gmail with scarcely a blink.

Users will eventually embrace the latest tactics, too--and by then, they'll complain about even deeper levels of intimacy yet to be invented, said Tracy Ryan, professor of advertising research at Virginia Commonwealth University

'You want to have enough targeting that a consumer notices the message and pays attention, but you don't want it to be so obvious that they are thinking (there) is targeting,' she said. 'That would be scary.'"… Read more

AOL, Netflix and the end of open access to research data

Correction: The authors of the Netflix de-anonymization study contacted me to point out that they originally published a draft of their results a mere two weeks after Netflix released its dataset. Netflix has known about their study for over a year.

Over the past year, there have been a number of high-profile incidents in which sensitive user data was accidentally revealed to the Internet at large. As a result, I believe that high-tech companies will never again share anonymized data on their users with academic researchers, at least not without requiring contracts and nondisclosure agreements. For the users and privacy … Read more

Rough seas nearly sink Facebook's Beacon

Facebook's "Beacon" advertising program nearly ran aground this week.

First, the liberal activist group MoveOn.org tore into the strategy, which shares members' activity from third-party sites on their Facebook "news feeds," as an invasion of privacy. Then MoveOn upped the ante earlier this week over the program's lack of an opt-out control. Then, on Thursday, reports began to surface that the program was close to being heavily altered or even cut altogether. The advertising program continues to be scrutinized by legal experts, and several advocacy groups have already filed complaints to the Federal … Read more

Facebook announces modifications to Beacon advertising program

This post has been updated to clarify the names of companies participating in the Beacon program.

Facebook has altered its controversial "Beacon" advertising program, following complaints by users and protests from activist groups like MoveOn.org. The Beacon ads, which project Facebook users' activity on third-party partner sites--retailers like Blockbuster and eBay, for example--to their friends' "news feeds," are a key part of Facebook's much-hyped new social-advertising program, but they hadn't received the friendliest of reception.

It's a situation reminiscent of the one last year when the initial launch of Facebook's News … Read more

Facebook will modify, not spike Beacon ads

In the wake of reports that suggested Facebook might be close to axing its controversial Beacon advertising program altogether, a company employee has come out and said that while changes to the application are imminent, it's not going away.

This follows a BusinessWeek report from Wednesday that indicated the program would be tweaked or even eliminated altogether.

Beacon, a component of Facebook's new "Social Ads" initiative, was assailed soon after its debut by leftist activist group MoveOn.org over what the group saw as grave privacy concerns. MoveOn stepped up its rhetoric earlier this week when … Read more

Facebook set to kill "Beacon", and none too soon

The Register is reporting that Facebook is on the verge of killing its ill-fated and ill-conceived Beacon product, the privacy thief that reports purchases made outside Facebook to users within the Facebook system.

Even creepier than that, however, is how Beacon extends personal purchasing decisions to a wide range of third-party marketers, as MSNBC reports:… Read more

News.com talk: 'The Future of the Internet--and How to Stop It'

SAN FRANCISCO--Restrictive tools and rash approaches to security challenges are endangering the health of the online ecosystem, an Oxford University researcher warned Wednesday.

Jonathan Zittrain, who has written a book due out in April called The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It, gave a public talk on the issue Wednesday night at CNET's offices here. News.com hosted the talk--a first for our newsroom. The event, which drew 120 people, was sponsored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

You can call Zittrain's theme the AOL-ization of technology. Instead of personal computers being able to run any … Read more

Phoenix news team "investigates" new teachers' MySpace pages

Here's the lede from a Phoenix local news story: "CBS 5 Investigates discovered some Valley teachers making their private lives public by posting them on the Web."

Is it really a news flash to learn that recent college grads who are now teachers use MySpace? And that teachers have content on their MySpace pages that they don't want their first-graders to see?

Here comes the online networking generation gap, moving from college into the working world.

Most college students use online social networks, so most new teachers will have social network profiles. And yes, some of the MySpace and Facebook pages will still bear traces of sophomoric behavior on them, given that these new teachers are only a few years removed from being sophomores.

Am I concerned about this issue as a parent? Yes, of course, potentially. But this particular "investigation" looks like a low trick (or height of FARK) as the CBS 5 team decided to systematically snoop into teachers' pages. The news program says they "took a list of teachers who just started teaching in Arizona and searched for them one at a time on MySpace, checking to see which ones have profiles and what they might show."

What disturbs me most is that the CBS 5 story moves to the question of what kind of "higher standards" we hold teachers to and is more than willing to keep raising the bar to create wildly unrealistic standards of off-duty conduct. … Read more

My information, my story, my life

The Internet has enabled the emergence of a collective consciousness that is unprecedented in human history. We are coming together as a hive, and the intelligence of the swarm is being mined and utilized like never before.

Knowledge is power, information is a cash commodity, and who decides how these resources and benefits are distributed? The latest controversy about Facebook's Beacon advertisements is one of many examples that suggests that the issue of user control over his or her own information is reaching a tipping point. We, the online masses, are developing a new sense that our own information is sacred and worth protecting, and not to be indiscriminately broadcast, or blindly exploited for someone else's commercial gain.

Beyond a "right to privacy" that might have meant "secrecy" in the past, we need to think about the right to control our information when it comes to:

What I say about myself What others say about me, and How that information is used

I see these issues coming up time and time again in a thread that runs through everything from Internet safety, to social networking, creative artists' rights, consumer/patient rights, all the way up to government wiretapping and surveillance.… Read more

MoveOn to Facebook: We caught you red-handed

This story was updated at 2:36 PT to provide comment from Facebook and at 3:59 PT to provide further comment from MoveOn.

Is there more to the controversy surrounding Facebook's "Beacon" ads? MoveOn.org thinks so.

Last week, a feud began to brew between leftist activist group MoveOn.org and social-networking site Facebook concerning its "Beacon" advertisements, which broadcast information about users' activity on third-party partner sites to their friends' Facebook newsfeeds. According to MoveOn, it's a violation of user privacy because there's no way to universally opt out of Beacon … Read more