Facebook & Privacy? Should Marketers Be Concerned?

There is a great quote from privacy guru Danah Boyd talking about privacy online. She says “just because something is publicly accessible does not mean that people want it to be publicized.”

This is particularly apropos for marketing and advertising – because our whole aim is to make things as public as possible.

So, as marketers, what are we to make of the furor over Facebook’s announcement to expand the availability of consumer data with advertisers. Certainly Forrester has some thoughts about this (http://blogs.forrester.com/augie_ray/10-04-29-facebook_privacy_lawmakers_what_should_marketers_do). But the real question is should marketers be concerned?

At its surface it would seem that Facebook is honestly trying to do its best to alleviate customer concerns over making information public. But, they have really gone about this in a ham-fisted way.

Earlier last week the New York Times had this infographic (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/05/12/business/facebook-privacy.html) discussing how complex the privacy settings really are in Facebook. This certainly didn’t do the company any good from a PR perspective.

Some interesting facts:

• There are more than 50 settings with almost 200 options in order to set your privacy. That’s more settings than almost in any application we have installed in our company.

• Facebook’s privacy policy has more than 5,800 words in it—that’s 10 pages of fine print for the average consumer to go through.

So, at Boyd Communications, we are recommending our clients watch this closely.

It will be interesting to see if Facebook can move past this crisis – or if this is the beginning of the end for the giant social network. There are already talks of “open source” social networks starting up. One of them called Diaspora is being funded by donations and is claiming that it will be extraordinarily private. It’s oddly ironic that an “open source” social network will actually be created to be “tighter” on privacy and security – but these are the shifting sands of social media that we are in.

There is also a movement among many to “Quit Facebook”. A formal group has even announced a D-Day (of sorts) for it. It will be interesting to see on May 31^st (the Quit Facebook day)– if the social network will even notice the decrease however. Facebook is currently growing by more than 250,000 users per day. It’s quite possible that more people will join Facebook on “Quit Facebook Day” than will quit.

If you’re interested in how the new focus on privacy and publically available information might affect your own digital marketing efforts, as always please feel free to ask. We’re here to help.