Facebook to use personal info for targeting ads

Ask most any person what they think about online privacy and you are likely to get an answer that stresses the importance of protecting personal information. But: Review the social networking activity of your subjects and you’ll find a different story.

Users of Facebook and other social networks are posting extraordinary detail in their personal profiles, and the very nature of their networking and online interaction provides any viewer with intimate outlines of their lives and values. Yet Facebook users are likely to regard that content as somehow private and protected – or somehow separate from the issue of online privacy.

News that Facebook will let advertisers target ads based on users’ personal details – including hobbies, travel, photos and other ‘private’ information – might soon change that.

“The information made available by users can include everything from their date of birth, hobbies and interests to places and events they are planning to visit, as well as a wide variety of photographs.
“Advertisers will be able to access a special website containing this data, which will then enable them to identify their target audience with what is hoped will be a high level of accuracy.
“The ads would be different from the banner and box ads currently featured on the site, forming part of the “news feed” section which details the activities of a user’s listed “friends”.”

From WARC

The last sentence is crucial; it means that a central element of the Facebook interface, previously containing only notices about your friends’ Facebook activities, will be infiltrated with commercial content.

It is difficult to predict, however, how Facebook users will react. Most users will predictably oppose the change initially, but on the other hand users have not reacted against conventional banner ads that have been working their way into Facebook pages. Facebook’s appearance is far less obtrusively commercial than competitors like MySpace, and placing ads into the Facebook “News Feed” might not change that appearance; this strategy lets ads be insidiously well-targeted and places them in a context that almost forces users to read them, yet won’t necessarily turn Facebook into a garish side-show of flashing ads and bad design (like MySpace).

The Wall Street Journal story on this issue reveals even more depth to the topic:

“Next year, Facebook hopes to expand on the service, one person says, using algorithms to learn how receptive a person might be to an ad based on readily available information about activities and interests of not just a user but also his friends — even if the user hasn’t explicitly expressed interest in a given topic. Facebook could then target ads accordingly.”

From the Wall Street Journal

Making an online network profitable is a tightrope-walking venture. Will users permit the commercialisation not only of ‘their’ network, but of their personal details and network activity? We’ll just have to wait and see what network is growing fastest a year from now…

Update on Sunday, July 27, 2008 at 10:41PM by Ken Thomas

Since I wrote this post a great deal has happened in the world of Facebook, including:

• Online social networking continues to grow,
  
• Facebook defies predictions of audience ‘Facebook fatigue’ in spite of obnoxiously viral activity of popular embedded applications,
• Facebook exchanges users’ personal information with advertisers to create a rather unpopular and invasive marketing tool, then scales the project back as people react,
• Facebook roars past MySpace to become the biggest social network,
• Facebook faces much criticism for its questionable policies realting to user privacy and ownership of content (but stays quiet and avoids widespread perception of these issues),
• Facebook announces redesign of interface and opening of its system to developers, aiming to allow user profiles and details to port across sites of many types, naming preferred partners but so far releasing none of the discussed evolution.

I’ll be blogging more about Facebook some time soon, being particularly interested in the online public’s acceptance of what would not long ago have been considered unfair and invasive business practices. (Has online privacy become a completely outdated concept?)