Julian Dunn's Journal … don't call it a "blog" …

It seems like over the last two months, everyone I know has been talking about Facebook. (I guess that’s not surprising in my particular locality; according to Wikipedia, Toronto has the largest concentration of Facebook users, numbering 50,000). Personally, I’ve stayed away from Facebook, not only because I perceive it to be the Web 2.0 (or are we on 3.0 by now?) version of MySpace, but because people’s expressions of excitement at having found long-lost acquaintances are exactly what turn me off. I’m not interested in reconnecting with people that I’ve lost touch with for years; there’s probably a legitimate reason for the loss of contact, and I’m happy letting sleeping dogs lie.

It occurred to me recently that there are far more valuable reasons for avoiding Facebook, however; a database that contains a ream of personal information about your interests, hobbies, friends, political affiliations, and so on is a ripe target for marketers interested in data mining the hell out of it. What weaselly marketing guy wouldn’t salivate at the thought of being able to correlate any arbitrary aspect of a user’s profile with another, and deliver targeted content or advertisements to that user? Or to resell that data to large corporations to be able to tailor advertising campaigns towards the psychology of a given market segment to induce members to buy a product? The possibilities are endless – and disturbing.

Then, last weekend, my fears were realized in this article in which Facebook’s VP of media sales outlines future plans. As the Globe often puts older articles under lock and key, I’ll quote the relevant section here:

In September, Facebook began allowing marketers to set up sponsored groups, where they can place ads, run contests and lead discussion topics in an effort to build a continuing two-way dialogue with their most loyal consumers.

“We decided from a revenue perspective that banners were the best way to monetize the site as we were growing,” said Mike Murphy, vice-president of media sales at Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook Inc.

“What we found is that in order to allow marketers to leverage the benefits that a social network can deliver, we needed to include integration and sponsored content as part of that so that marketers could create a daily dialogue with their most passionate users and have a feedback loop about how they engage.”

Monetize and leverage to create a daily feedback loop – that’s exactly what I was afraid of. ($weasel.factor() = HIGH) Others have already flagged the privacy implications of having a database of 18 million users (with rich metadata about each of those users), particularly in conjunction with Facebook’s lax privacy profile which states, among other things, "We may share your information with third parties, including responsible companies with which we have a relationship." And then, of course, is the ever-present question: what happens when Facebook is sold to a gigantic media conglomerate? Or if they are sold to Google? Last year I identified the dangers of outsourcing one’s critical applications to the Web, with Google as a particular example. It’d be far worse if one’s Facebook profile, for example, were to then be associated with one’s email, office application data, chat transcripts, and so on.

Not to overstate the case here, but to me, the overarching danger of all this Web 2.0 hype (jokes aside) is that we’re really building a gigantic data warehouse about people’s lives, all under the umbrella of "increased interactivity" (Total Information Awareness, anyone?) And that’s even scarier than the possibility of having a Grade 6 "girlfriend" try to reconnect with you on Facebook.