Blog 7 - Facebook

Facebook’s selling of private information from its users’ profiles to advertisers is a very controversial subject. This exaggerated even more when Facebook’s advertisers use this personal information as “consumer insights” and customize advertisements directed toward each individual Facebook user. The way in which Facebook’s advertisers collect users’ personal information has several privacy implications.
Without having to read any articles about this issue, I have been able to identify this issue as a regular Facebook user. I am not naive and neither are my friends. I assume the majority of Facebook’s users are similar to my friends and me. We all noticed the change on the website because it was so very obvious. Facebook never disclosed what it was doing with users’ profiles and personal information.
I understand that I use the Facebook website absolutely for free and I am grateful for the many benefits it provides to me. Some of these benefits include being able to chat with other users, send mail to other users, view other users profiles and their pictures (who have given me permission to view them I might add), create my own personalized website, post pictures and comments, post status updates, and view status updates. I also am able to use cool applications such as events, movies, top friends, etc.
However, I feel that Facebook should have sent out an e-mail to its many loyal users in order to explain what it was doing with our personal information. It also would have been nice if they had put in plain words why they legally were able to do this.
Facebook’s advertisers never requested access to my personal information from me or any other users that I know of. We can assume that each advertiser simply paid Facebook a very large amount of money to have exclusive access to observe and collect personal information from users’ profiles. As a loyal Facebook user, I feel betrayed by Facebook because I feel as though my personal information just went to the highest bidder.
From a profit standpoint, it is understandable why Facebook sold its users’ personal information to advertisers willing to pay a substantial amount of money. Yet, I do not feel this gives Facebook the right to do this in such a sneaker manner. As a very large networking website, Facebook should treat its loyal customer base with courtesy and respect. It all goes back to ethics. Facebook just got greedy and doesn’t seem to have any ethics plain and simple.
What really frustrated me and my friends who use Facebook regularly was when we noticed that the advertisements went from being generic to being personalized to what we each said in our profile that we liked and enjoyed doing. That is when we realized that Facebook was not only secretly selling our personal information and access to our profiles without our consent but was also allowing these advertisers to direct their advertisements to us directly on Facebook.
I don’t believe any of the advertisers are to blame for this situation even though they definitely contributed to it. Social networking websites have a wealth of information on it that are considered the “holy grail” of customer insights to marketers.
I am blaming Facebook for neglecting its users and not having business ethics. We were never given explicit knowledge of what Facebook was doing with our information, we never explicitly consented to Facebook allowing marketers and advertisers access to our personal information. I would have more positive feelings about Facebook if I had been given a notice about what was going on behind the scenes and had given the option to opt out. Unfortunately for Facebook, neither of these two things was done and now Facebook has many of its 175 million active users angry at it.