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Well duh, of course Facebook wants to market your data
Now, despite what articles like Nick O'Neill's on AllFacebook say about "official word" poo-pooing the Telegraph article as being totally off-base, it certainly seems plausible enough.
It's not as though Facebook is a home for orphans or an animal shelter. It's a gargantuan social networking site that employs hordes of people and requires a massive IT infrastructure to keep the wheels turning.
How exactly do people expect them to pay for that? Bake sales? Telethons?
No, they're going to do it in the way that makes the most sense for a site that has gigabytes of personal information about: they're going to whore out their polling system your data to any company that is willing to pay for access to it.
It's not like people didn't see this coming. Last January, Grant wrote about how Facebook put the boots to Robert Scoble when he tried to scrape his own friends list for data. Would they have been that upset if they didn't have other plans for that information up their sleeves?
At this point, Facebook's claims that quotes were misinterpreted sound a bit like damage control. Time will tell, but come on, folks. What do you expect a business to do with a database chock full of tasty marketing data like the one Facebook has amassed?
Comments
2
Subscribe to commentsStevenFeb 2nd 2009 1:37PM
So, what exactly does this mean for its users? What kind of information are they allowed/not allowed to sell? I hope all they sell is non-identifying data.
HelFeb 2nd 2009 1:42PM
Well, I've got AdBlock, so I say, "whore away". This is the Internet, we're all very good at ignoring targetted marketing already. If Facebook is smart (and I really do think they are) they'll annoy their users just enough to make some money, but not enough that they migrate to The Next Big Thing (tm).