If Facebook ruled the world … we would walk a mall and would be able to see everything our friends have purchased. Sally picked up a nice leather corset, Jim bought a book on impotence and I see that Tom is constipated. Is this an exaggerating? Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to bring the open graph to your life. It sounds like the Googlegrid predicted in EPIC 2014.
To me is 350 million user question is What do people value more – privacy or personalization? And will Facebook’s bid to control the web be at the expense of people’s privacy backfire?
Facebook’s latest announcements have attracted the attention of Congress. Last Sunday Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., urged the Federal Trade Commission get its privacy settings on social-networking sites guidelines together quickly. This came days after Facebook announced its plan to gather affinity data from all across the Internet with the new Open Graph platform. Facebook stores your Internet activity data and can push it to partners such as Pandora or Yelp to personalize website experiences, or to publishers to fuel recommendation engines.
This brings back memories of 2007 when CEO Mark Zuckerberg had to apologize for Beacon, a feature for users to share online activities outside Facebook. Bloggers’ responded with increased skepticism of Facebook’s new data collection and privacy settings.
Mashable responded with instructions on hour to disable Facebook’s “instant personalization,” a process to some appears difficult. Are the privacy threats real? Or is this simply a public relations mishap?