Most of us accept that things we don’t pay for – such as broadcast TV and Internet sites – are supported by advertising or have some sort of catch in order to pay their bills.
Social media sites have been a great example of this, millions of users on services like Facebook and LinkedIn have accepted targeted advertising and the associated privacy trade offs as the cost of getting a free online service.
The price of “free” though is escalating, the social networks have moved on from just using our data for displaying advertisements to processing our private information and distributing it in ways we may have never expected.
Professional networking site LinkedIn caused an uproar last week when their social advertising feature started adding what appeared to be users’ personal endorsements to adverts for products, businesses and websites based on behaviour monitored by the site’s tracking software.
Facebook, the leading social networking site, also had a recent privacy scare when users discovered the services’ Phonebook feature gleefully displays all the mobile phone numbers of their online contacts and, given the right settings, merges them with those from a mobile phone.
The recently launched Google Plus takes these risks even further as the search engine giant requires a personal profile before you can use the service which can then be integrated into your search and email histories.
What we’ve ‘Liked’ or ‘Followed’ online – or even just looked at – is now being processed, regurgitated and delivered to our friends and the public as endorsements and recommendations just like a retired sportsman selling air conditioners or hair restoration products.
At least the retired cricketer flogging hair products or long past it soap opera star promoting washing powder gets a paycheck, all a social media user gets from the transaction the privilege of sharing their private information along with personal and professional relationships with a multinational advertising platform.
In some ways the social advertising functions are worse for the user than the celebrity endorsement; most people know the retired sportsman or actress is doing it for a paycheck, the social network advertising clearly implies your friends like that product or company.
We should also remember it’s not just the sites themselves, one of the reasons for Facebook’s popularity has been the games and applications people can use. Every one of these features has some access to your data and most have a business model for using it to make a buck.
It’s become common for online applications to send out messages on new users’ accounts, pretending to be a personal message from them. Just this week a new service invoked the ire of Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, for doing exactly this.
This processing of our own data and services is a logical step for social media services desperate to justify billion dollar valuations of their business but few people signed up to these sites to endorse random products or allow someone else to send advertising on their behalf.
Privacy is no longer the issue with social media services, we’ve now moved into the corporate ownership of our identities. What a corporate algorithm decides are our likes is now being processed and publicly displayed as our endorsements, our tastes and dislikes.
What interests us, what we enjoy and what we like forms the core of our identities, friendships and personalities. That social media sites seek to take this from us should be our greatest concern with these platforms.
We need to be careful with what, and whom, we share, like and connect with online.
“What we’ve ‘Liked’ or ‘Followed’ online – or even just looked at – is now being processed, regurgitated and delivered to our friends and the public as endorsements and recommendations just like a retired sportsman selling air conditioners or hair restoration products.”
I read an article about Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist funding the set-up of Facebook, in the Guardian back in 2008 and decided I wouldn’t be signing up for Facebook, thank you.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook?INTCMP=SRCH
The section that’s most relevant to what you describe above:
Value now exists in imaginary things. Thiel says that PayPal was motivated by this belief: that you can find value not in real manufactured objects, but in the relations between human beings. PayPal was a way of moving money around the world with no restriction. Bloomberg Markets puts it like this: “For Thiel, PayPal was all about freedom: it would enable people to skirt currency controls and move money around the globe.”
Clearly, Facebook is another uber-capitalist experiment: can you make money out of friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries – and then sell Coca-Cola to them? Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening anyway.
Thiel’s philosophical mentor is one René Girard of Stanford University, proponent of a theory of human behaviour called mimetic desire. Girard reckons that people are essentially sheep-like and will copy one another without much reflection. The theory would also seem to be proved correct in the case of Thiel’s virtual worlds: the desired object is irrelevant; all you need to know is that human beings will tend to move in flocks. Hence financial bubbles. Hence the enormous popularity of Facebook.
“Mimetic desire” – now that’s a VERY offputting phrase.
Interesting post.
The problem is, from what I can see, is that for some reason people don’t approach their interaction with a social network with the same level of skepticism they would an interaction with any other business.
Social networks seem to get a free-pass and, in spite of a number of severe privacy and trust breaches over the short time they’ve been in existence, people are still attracted to the idea of volunteering everything about their lives to any company that turns up saying that they’re “here to connect you with friends”.
I find it immensely frustrating that people never seen to learn about the consequences of putting all their personal information on social networks, or what the motivations are of a business running a social network.
How you can think that Google Plus or Facebook are anything BUT data-mining operations looking to know as much about you as they can so they can sell your profile for advertising space just boggles my mind.
Thoughtful article, Paul and very useful comments by Arbed.
This is the internet version of Tupperware. I was amazed about this method of selling plastic tubs in ones home with ones friends. Trading friendship for commercial gain. This, I thought, selling method was culturally acceptable for the US only, but no,it works here.
Of course a free friendship site, originating in the US would data mine for profit, it is in their blood.