Beware of the Facebook

Being an online marketer by trade, I have to delve into various online environments to see how they work and how they can be used for marketing initiatives. With all the chatter surrounding Facebook, the law, digital space, and contradictions, I thought it might be helpful to bring your attention to what's going on with them.

It seems that since the birth of the World Wide Web, the intention, due to its free flowing democratic makeup, is to try and catch it with its pants down – from URL vultures (purchasing a URL for $10 and reselling the URL for $10K to $100K or more, depending on the notoriety of the celebrity or the person who wants the URL back), the annoying growth of pop up ads, the email spammers (unsolicited emails you can’t trace to a company) and file sharing, etc.

Despite the idiosyncrasies of online marketing, Facebook’s new tactic is quite genius considering the architecture of the network is to ensure privacy. But capitalism reigns supreme. It is a known fact that most people on social networks seldom click on ads; they are more interested in their friends. Imagine if someone in your friends list endorsed a product, attaching their face to it. Wouldn’t that make you pay more attention to the product? Nine times out of ten, it would. However, the new advertising venture that Facebook launched last week faces many challenges.

The venture rests on its members for legitimization, under the guise of giving the audience the freedom to choose. Participation could mean publicizing your online behavior to your network of friends. For example, it’s Halloween and Ricky’s [the costume store] has regional ads placed throughout Facebook. It reminds you to purchase your costume. You click through from Facebook to Ricky’s website and buy your Catwoman costume. After making your purchase, a thought springs to mind, “Oh, I want to get a whip to go with the outfit!” You leave Ricky’s website and do a search for ‘black whips’, which brings back a slew on pornographic sites. With the new software Facebook has developed, your shopping history can now be attached to your profile in reference to Ricky’s as a selling point for potential customers, Ricky’s obtains information about you, and visiting pornographic sites is added to your demographic information. Privacy is completely lost and no disclaimer or acknowledgment has been checked.

The other problem is in New York State, it is illegal for Facebook to operate with other advertisers and not get sued. The statute says that “any person whose name, portrait, picture, or voice is used within this state for advertising purposes or for the purposes of trade without the written consent first obtained can sue for damages.” This 100-year-old privacy law does not translate into our digital times. You could purchase an item from a particular store, but you may not want to have your profile attached to the product. When the CAN-SPAM Act 2003 (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) was devised, one of FTC’s goals was to eliminate the abuse of marketers on the web. The internet has made these companies faceless and in turn unreachable entities. The advertising industry partnering with social networking sites is no different to what CAN-SPAM has been trying to control or to keep in compliance for the past five years.

Facebook’s new ad schema makes sense for an environment that is difficult to penetrate—-but what’s the cost? Be careful when searching online within the web of these social network sites. Your privacy can seriously be compromised.

The GPS

I love the new GPS systems in New York Taxis. Driving around, and seeing where you are in proximity to your destination. It’s really great.

Recently, the Taxi Drivers Association was up in arms about surveillance and losing their privacy. Hello, aren’t they at work? Shouldn’t their boss/supervisor know where they are or at least have an idea? To complain that the installation of the GPS is an invasion of privacy is a far stretch. It’s not as if their boss is filming them take a leak during a lunch break in some dank looking restaurant.

The whole GPS/Taxi and Limousine Commission unrest brings to mind a vacation I had in New York circa ’94. After a long night of partying, a girlfriend and I jumped into a cab. With only the physical address of where we were staying, which was a not-so-nice part of Brooklyn, East New York; we assumed the driver knew the streets of New York. After all, in order to drive a taxi in the London Metropolitan area, you have to pass the Hackney Carriage Exam. Doofuses are not permitted to drive London taxis. We assumed it was the same in New York.

With our landmarks vaguely in our heads - over the bridge, clock tower, roundabout, museum, wide road where the carnival is - and in this order, we shouldn't have any problems getting home. However, being a little liquored up, our sensors not as strong as we'd like, I noticed after getting off the bridge, we were driving along New York City's edge with the Hudson River to our right. Eventually we hit Linden and Pennsylvania. Any buzz we might have had at the start of the journey turned to fear. Fear of being taken hostage by an Indian cab driver, or being dumped, and left for dead in the 'hood of East New York. The meter read a whopping $53 when the taxi stopped outside the apartment on New Jersey Avenue.

Being South Londoners and deeming ourselves as "street tough" (if you saw us, you'd see how ridiculous this statement was), we weren't handing over that kind of money to a man who had no business driving a cab in the first place. But this particular driver wasn't stupid. He sped off, with us still in the cab, and circled the area in an attempt to confuse us, until we agreed to pay him at the least $40. Had the GPS system been in use then, it would have been a lifesaver; his arse would have gotten reported and the GPS would have backed us up.

So in retrospect, I can understand cab driver’s resistance to change after their long reign in freedom. Unfortunately, nothing lasts forever. Gone are the days of roaming the streets of New York, in complete control of which route they take us in. Now it’s all about the digital trail. Technology....ahhh, a wonderful thing.