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Who Owns You?
Finding a Balance between Online Privacy and Targeted Advertising
On November 6, 2007; Facebook outlined a strategy to integrate more
targeted
advertising into its popular social networking website. |
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg saw the new initiative as an opportunity for
users to refer products to each other and allow friends to share information
as they shopped online and visited other websites. The system, called
Beacon, was also intended to lead to more relevant -- and profitable --
advertising through precise targeting based on a user's buying habits,
social circle and geography.
But on December 5, after receiving numerous complaints from the high school
kids, college students and young professionals who populate Facebook,
Zuckerberg issued an apology for a program that, among other things, could
track a user's web behavior and report it on a Facebook user's profile page.
The problem: Facebook didn't initially ask its customers to opt in to the
targeting program. As a result, some customers were caught off guard by
Facebook's sudden use of detailed user tracking. In conjunction with the
apology, Facebook introduced new privacy options to give users more control
over how Beacon operates.
The incident raises many questions, according to experts at Wharton. For
example, what is the balance between privacy and online ad targeting? Will
marketers continue to experiment? Are these early efforts just a precursor
of what's to come? Will consumers become more wary of sharing
information?
Does privacy really exist online?
Read more from the source
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