Per my post yesterday on privacy comes another good story from Brad Stone of the NYT, what MySpace is doing with the data members put up on their pages. Surprising exactly nobody, except perhaps some members, the company is using software to target ads based on what people explicitly say on their sites, as well as information they can glean based on links and group memberships. Money quote from MySpace:
“We are blessed with a phenomenal amount of information about the likes, dislikes and life’s passions of our users,” said Peter Levinsohn, president of Fox Interactive Media, who will talk about the program at an address to investors and analysts at a Merrill Lynch conference in Los Angeles on Tuesday. “We have an opportunity to provide advertisers with a completely new paradigm.”
Most people would consider this to be "personal" information, but the minute it goes digital, it belongs to....someone else. The upside of course, potentially for both MySpace and its customers, is ads they care about. If ads are a necessary evil, and right now they are funding all these sites, then at least make them interesting and relevant. Downside? Privacy:
That is precisely the goal that worries some privacy advocates. They argue that users of social networks like MySpace and Facebook are not aware they are being monitored and that current ad-targeting is only the first step in what has become a huge arms race to collect revealing data on Internet users.
“People should be able to congregate online with their friends without thinking that big brother, whether it is Rupert Murdoch or Mark Zuckerberg, are stealthily peering in,” said Jeff Chester, executive director at the Center for Digital Democracy in Washington.
My view is that what MySpace is doing is neither good nor bad -- it is just the natural next step of the more rapid dissemination of personal information, more or less freely shared. The key is making sure that everyone is thinking-- in advance -- of what information they are giving away.