Face Novel

It seems that now days facebook is all the rage. College kids love it. High school kids love it. Older people are confused by it (but still love it). And investors most certainly love it. I have to admit, I still don't completely see the point. I see how it's easier to maintain a loose relationship with a long-lost pal by being "facebook friends" but is my 5-10 minutes a day really affecting my life? I have to admit that I don't quite understand how people manage to spend hours and hours a day on the site.

On the other hand, I understand extremely well while facebook received such a high valuation (15 billion smackers!). It's because what seems like an innocuous site connecting you to old friends and turning you into a zombie is in reality an Internet marketer's wet dream. Users on facebook are only to happy to update and update and update and update all of their personal information. This is information that marketers can use to segment the facebook community so that their ads are shown to extremely specific demographics. I highly doubt that most facebook users realize that their personal data is not only being shown with their friends, but also being sold to the highest bidder. To make matters worse, I'm not so sure that facebook is secure. A friend of mine recently created a group on facebook. The group was Israel themed. Within a week the group had been hacked to show an Israeli map with an overlay of the Palestinian flag and all content changed to anti-semitic anti-Israel rhetoric. There was also a new group administrator named Salahaddin Salam. Despite numerous requests facebook won't explain how this could have happened and will only respond that the issue is now closed. It just leaves us to question just how secure all of that personal data stored on facebook really is. Check out the screenshot of the hacked page below.

Of course all of this overflows into the dialog currently raging regrading Internet privacy. Marketers wanted to be able to embed a cookie into every browser so that all of your juicy personal information could follow you around the Internet and let marketers show extremely targeted advertisements. Marketers also wanted to track your movements on the Internet to further target their ads. Essentially, they want to have all of your personal information and know everything you do online. Sounds a little big brother-esque to me. Kudos to AOL for creating a "do not track" list which allows you to opt-out of this kind of targeting is being likened to the "do not call" lists that stop tele-marketers from interrupting your dinner.

We'll see what happens as the debate about Internet privacy continues (Congress is getting in on the act) but bottom line people, be aware of what you put online. And who could potentially be watching.