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April 06, 2008
CDD on “The Facebook Economy"; NYT on behavioral targeting.
Our colleagues at Center for Digital Democracy have released a brief new report "on widgets, third-party apps" called The Facebook Economy: Deficits in Data Privacy. The report investigates the new Facebook ecosystem, which allows third party developers to integrate their products into Facebook, "changing Facebook from a closed social network into an open business forum" and posing privacy questions. Excerpt: Because of their deep integration into Facebook, developers have extensive access to user information, but it is often unclear if, when and how they exploit this data. This situation is perpetuated by Facebook’s unwillingness to regulate the widgets that operate on the site. As a result, users often have no idea who is collecting their data, how information is obtained as one interacts with these applications and how such data -- even so called not non-personally identifiable information -- is subsequently used. Coincidentally, New York Times columnist Adam Cohen's Saturday piece is The Already Big Thing on the Internet: Spying on Users. He discusses the relentless collection of information by both websites and, also, ISPs, for behavioral targeting, and describes some of the risks. Excerpt:
The driving force behind this prying is commerce. The big growth area in online advertising right now is "behavioral targeting." Web sites can charge a premium if they are able to tell the maker of an expensive sports car that its ads will appear on Web pages clicked on by upper-income, middle-aged men. [...] There is also no guarantee that the information will stay with the company that collected it. It can be sold to employers or insurance companies, which have financial motives for wanting to know if their workers and policyholders are alcoholics or have AIDS. It could also end up with the government, which needs only to serve a subpoena to get it (and these days that formality might be ignored). If George Orwell had lived in the Internet age, he could have painted a grim picture of how Web monitoring could be used to promote authoritarianism.
Posted by Ed Mierzwinski at April 6, 2008 11:54 AM
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