Facebook is entering new territory over privacy and how the company negotiates this with its 400 million users will be its biggest test yet. It's likely to put the site on a collision course with regulators around the world.
The Financial Times reports that Facebook has developed a "behavioural targeting" system that its tracks users' behaviour when they visit other sites around the Internet. It then uses the information to deliver highly targeted advertisements to them on Facebook. It's a radical departure from the old system where users are hit with targeted ads based only on the personal information in that user's profile like, for example, location, age, gender and relationship status.
This could turn out to be a problem for Facebook. As reported here 95% of Facebook users don't like changes to Facebook privacy settings. That's odd because users can adjust privacy setting, maybe they just don't know how to do it.
Still, this is something that needs to be watched because it's a sign of things to come. As the New York Times tells us, social networking sites including Twitter and MySpace are now moving to expand their presence across the Web. Facebook plans to introduce a universal "Like" button that Web publishers will be able to put on their pages. The Like button will allow Facebook to keep a record of what a user linked to. That provides Facebook with ever data about people's preferences and Facebook can then share that data with Web publishers.
This is the direction that social networking is moving towards and it will run into privacy hurdles as they share increasing amounts of personal information about their users with other sites. For them to put the onus back on users, and let users decide, will not be enough. Some people simply don't know how to do it.
With the German government slamming Facebook for its slack approach to privacy, you can bet it's only a matter of time before regulators and governments start clamping down on social networking sites.
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