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.
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