Op-Ed Contributors

Coming face to face with Facebook

By Esther Dyson (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-07-02 07:50

But that is only part of the privacy discussion. The comforting thing about the kind of data that Facebook primarily deals with is that it's public. If your friends and other people can see it, so can you.

More troubling is the data you don't even know about - the kind of data about your online activities collected by advertising networks and shared with advertisers and other marketers, and sometimes correlated with offline data from other vendors.

By and large, that's information you can't see - what you clicked on, what you searched for, which pages you came from and went to - and neither can your friends, for the most part. But that information is sold and traded, manipulated with algorithms to classify you and to determine what ads you see, what e-mails you receive, and often what offers are made to you. Of course, some of that information could go astray.

Personally, I don't really mind that, but there are many people who would, if they understood what was going on in the first place. I predict that, whether it's this year or in 10 years, this will become a much greater issue than what information people share openly with friends.

The challenge is to make this hidden sharing of information less confusing, more explicit, and more transparent before the majority of people discover it in a way that leaves them feeling deceived. I regularly attend advertising industry events and raise this issue, and the answers I get are something along the lines of "what people don't know won't hurt them", or "all we're doing is giving them ads better targeted to their interests".

But people have a way of objecting to being manipulated like that. They like to be treated as individuals, not to be put into buckets. I keep telling marketers that this is not a threat, but an opportunity. Just as Facebook has educated people, clumsily, about privacy controls, so marketers must educate people, ideally more elegantly, about tracking controls. I hope it won't take 10 years and a lot of bad publicity for advertisers to figure that out.

From my own perspective, as I look at the emerging market for people generating and using their own health/behavior data, this commotion is useful. People who share health data are likely to be much more adept at managing it than they would have been just a few years ago. They will also be fairly skeptical about the companies they entrust it to.

That ultimately argues for transparency and paid models, so that consumers don't wonder what other allegiances companies may have. "I pay you to manage my data," is pretty straightforward. "I give you my data and you give me a free service" leaves the customer wondering what else the company may do with the data.

The author is chairman of EDventure Holding and an active investor in a variety of start-ups around the world.

Project Syndicate.

(China Daily 07/02/2010 page9)