Many social networking sites today have all had their fair share of issues with information privacy, from LinkedIn, Twitter, and most notably Facebook. In the online business, consumer data is extremely important, and marketing teams would strongly desire to obtain and analyze these consumer databases to understand their trends and develop goods and service that correctly target these people. It would be a dream for a marketing firm to have access to all of the information for over 1 billion Facebook users at their disposal. Having such a database would also deem very valuable for these social networking sites.
One example would be the Facebook beacon program, that would track certain activities of Facebook users on participating websites, and then report those activities to the user’s Facebook friends as means of increasing brand awareness. There have been incidents of users that have logged off and have not given consent but their activities are still notified to their friends. This has been a breach in privacy, as users whether logged off or not are being tracked while on other websites. Eventually, settlements have been made for this privacy incident and the program ultimately abandoned. However this has left a mark for Facebook users to always be careful of what Facebook posts on your behalf. This case occurred during November 2007, years before Facebook’s first IPO. Now with the company going public, it is even more obliged to make more money from it’s client database as much as possible. It is questionable if there would be another beacon program from the relentless pressure of making money and ultimately would users of the networking site give up on Facebook?
I agree with Cindy Leung’s post about what social networking companies should think about in their corporate strategies. There are privacy laws that protect the human rights of users that use these social services. Sites like Facebook that are now enlisted on the stock exchange are even more pressured now to release and sell the data of their users to earn as much revenue as possible to please shareholders. With constant changes in their privacy policies and functions, in the short run a company may be able to earn some short term profit from newly fetched data that they may legally obtain, but they should understand that consumers will find these leaks. Instead, companies should look at aiming for long term sustainability and being socially responsible to maintain their consumer base for the long run so they can earn a steady stream of profit and not a short term spike.
