A Perspective on Entrepreneurship, Technology & Locative Dynamics

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of social networking site Facebook, wrote a blog post called “Thoughts on Beacon”. Beacon is the one month old highly controversial Facebook advertising platform that is developed to monetize the huge Facebook user base in better ways than before. Advertising on social networks is still a difficult topic because users are more interested in their friends updates than in any ads surrounding them. The result are very low ad click rates. Therefore it is necessary to think about new ways of advertising and how to create more targeted, highly specific ads. Behavioral advertising is the big hope and its intention is to analyze thoroughly the user behavior with the goal to predict exactly the user’s interests and intentions. Sounds scary, it is…

“About a month ago, we released a new feature called Beacon to try to help people share information with their friends about things they do on the web. We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it. While I am disappointed with our mistakes, we appreciate all the feedback we have received from our users. I’d like to discuss what we have learned and how we have improved Beacon.” Mark Zuckerberg

What Beacon is supposed to do, is to collect user data from participating websites. This means if you go on a website that is collaborating with Facebook, it can send your personal information, like the IP, the URL you accessed, the access time, the products you have been interested in and so on, back to Facebook’s Beacon which creates very detailed user profiles. You don’t have to be logged in and you don’t have to be a Facebook user, this is how the platform is supposed to work. This gathered information is also used to send automatic updates to your friends on Facebook with the sites or products you have been interested in. By default this “Share everything” behavior was enabled but now they switched from opt-out to opt-in which is a more sensible approach.

The questions that arise:

• How can you be sure that if you access a website that it won’t send personal data to other “partner” websites? From a technical standpoint this is totally transparent for the user and out of his or her control.
• Is the future of advertising the collection of personal user data from a large number of websites? There will be huge centralized data repositories with the purpose of creating detailed user profiles to predict behavior.
• Is it good for the user privacy, if a a social network opens up its platform? Data portability is something useful for the user but if it is too easy for third parties to get access to it, the risks will increase. Nearly all Facebook users integrate third-party applications which are provided by untrustworthy companies, private persons and insecure servers. With the Open Social widget platform this development continues and there are no standards how data privacy protection can be guaranteed.
• More and more applications are connected with each other, through APIs for example, but are you always aware that you access a meta application working on top of maybe several data leaking, untrustworthy, insecure servers?

A difficult topic with no solution so far. Data privacy standards and agreements are always based on trust and often failed its purpose.

• Market Watch: Facebook’s Beacon collects non-user data as well
• Thoughts on Beacon by Mark Zuckerberg
• Privacy settings for External Websites for Facebook users.
• Paypal redirects links to ad agency DoubleClick