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Without a doubt, social media is the biggest thing to hit the advertising industry since television, the huge difference between the two mediums being that TV was a one-way conversation, advertisers hawking their wares. Social media, on the other hand, has brought two words into the relationship not previously uttered – conversation and content. Social media has also given the consumer a voice – a powerful voice – and a means to use that voice. The conventional advertiser/consumer relationship is dead, never to be resurrected.

This is not to say that traditional advertising is dead. Rather, television, radio, magazines, and newspapers have transformed their businesses to take advantage of the synergies available between the various platforms. But, you already know all of this…

However, this new space has also opened up deep legal issues in the areas of privacy, intellectual property, identity theft, defamation, and self-incrimination. While privacy has long been the online community’s main watch word, identity theft is surpassing privacy due to the fact that it stems from a users lack of privacy online. Most online users are aware of the trade-offs brought about by online shopping, social media sites, and the costs associated with free content; it’s pay to play, and your privacy is the currency of choice. Buy a book from Amazon? Name, address, telephone number, email address, and a record of your purchases are all stored. Facebook account? Whatever you write in your profile will be utilized by marketers to target you with advertising; it’s the cost of admission. So, if you list one of your interests as “playing guitar,” you’ll see ads for local and national guitar retailers, music vendors, recording studios, and the like. Additionally, they know your demographic, geographic, and psychographic information, and probably the web-surfing habits associated with your IP address. Read the rest of this entry »

The last couple of blogs I posted covered applications on Facebook, and how these applications basically were a trade-off between your privacy as a Facebook user (and that of all your friends) and using the application.  Thus, if you wanted to play Mafia Wars on Facebook, Mafia Wars will be able to access your personal information to use at their discretion. The Huffington Post describes the “loss of privacy” in a great article:

The frightening penetration of Facebook, My-space, Twitter and other virtual social communities adds a lot of leverage to this loss of privacy. What you say or write in confidence to someone, can possibly be advertised by that person or worse, by a hacker, and exposed to the whole 200 million users of Facebook or the 1 billion users of the Internet!

The Facebook Application and Privacy settings are found here. Per the agreement with the application: Read the rest of this entry »

On the last blog, we left off with the following statement regarding Facebook’s Privacy practices:

ALLOWING CAUSES ACCESS WILL LET IT PULL YOUR PROFILE INFORMATION, PHOTOS, YOUR FRIENDS’ INFO, AND OTHER CONTENT THAT IT REQUIRES TO WORK.

Most users hit “Allow,” use the application, and move on. Facebook posts the fact that the user accessed the application by posting the information on the his or her homepage, and on the live feed Wall of all the user’s friends. There is an option to not post at this point, but it does not seem to be used very often. So, the application has access to the user’s entire profile, as well as that of his/her friends. Once the user’s friends add their two-cents to the poll or take a quiz, the application has access to all of their friends. And so on. Soon, like a gigantic spiderweb, the application has access to millions of profiles. Just in case you’re not familiar with these applications, a few of the more popular ones are Gifts, Mafia Wars, Like/Dislike, Flixter, We’re Related, Who Has the Biggest Brain, and Causes. I visited the Living Social website (one of applications I had allowed) to read their Privacy Policy and Read the rest of this entry »