Aside from my ranting and raving about Facebook’s SocialAds initiative, their privacy policy is disturbing as well. It’s now common knowledge that facebook employees get the “perk” of spying on you and how you use the website.
Ok, back to the ranting and raving. Facebook has released two advertising products, Insights and Beacon. Inisghts is designed to take advantage of all that personal data you’ve been uploading for some time now. An advertiser can pay for Ad placement based on gender, religion, relationship status etc. So, you could hypothetically by served an Ad for a dating for dummies book because your profile proclaims you to be “single” looking for “random play.” P.S. You’re creepy.
Beacon, on the other hand, places tracking cookies on your computer to monitor your activity on other website like eBay and Travelocity, and then relay that information to your facebook friends’ news feeds.
For example,
Screen Shot Courtesy of TechCrunch.
Brilliant. Now my friends know when I buy self help books…
From now on I have to remember to delete my cookies before I buy something online. Otherwise, it could be broadcast to my entire social graph. Hopefully, some day the news feed evolves into this:
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