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Chronicling privacy erosion at Facebook

by drm on May 4, 2010

The team over at Electronic Frontier Foundation brings two things to its view of the web: a sense of perspective and a sense of history.

That makes this blog post by Kurt Opsahl, which provides excerpts from Facebook‘s privacy policy back to 2005, particularly powerful.

    Facebook Privacy Policy circa 2005:

No personal information that you submit to Thefacebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings.

    Facebook Privacy Policy circa 2006:

We understand you may not want everyone in the world to have the information you share on Facebook; that is why we give you control of your information. Our default privacy settings limit the information displayed in your profile to your school, your specified local area, and other reasonable community limitations that we tell you about.

    Facebook Privacy Policy circa 2007:

Profile information you submit to Facebook will be available to users of Facebook who belong to at least one of the networks you allow to access the information through your privacy settings (e.g., school, geography, friends of friends). Your name, school name, and profile picture thumbnail will be available in search results across the Facebook network unless you alter your privacy settings.

    Facebook Privacy Policy circa November 2009:

Facebook is designed to make it easy for you to share your information with anyone you want. You decide how much information you feel comfortable sharing on Facebook and you control how it is distributed through your privacy settings. You should review the default privacy settings and change them if necessary to reflect your preferences. You should also consider your settings whenever you share information. …

Information set to “everyone” is publicly available information, may be accessed by everyone on the Internet (including people not logged into Facebook), is subject to indexing by third party search engines, may be associated with you outside of Facebook (such as when you visit other sites on the internet), and may be imported and exported by us and others without privacy limitations. The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.” You can review and change the default settings in your privacy settings.

    Facebook Privacy Policy circa December 2009:

Certain categories of information such as your name, profile photo, list of friends and pages you are a fan of, gender, geographic region, and networks you belong to are considered publicly available to everyone, including Facebook-enhanced applications, and therefore do not have privacy settings. You can, however, limit the ability of others to find this information through search using your search privacy settings.

    Current Facebook Privacy Policy, as of April 2010:

When you connect with an application or website it will have access to General Information about you. The term General Information includes your and your friends’ names, profile pictures, gender, user IDs, connections, and any content shared using the Everyone privacy setting. … The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.” … Because it takes two to connect, your privacy settings only control who can see the connection on your profile page. If you are uncomfortable with the connection being publicly available, you should consider removing (or not making) the connection.

Note the accelerating pace of the changes. It’s not a coincidence that the commercial imperatives of the site — valuation, funding and getting money off the table — have become more widely reported in the press.

The economics of investment and return force products and services, regardless how innovative, into fairly predictable patterns of behavior. Note: Craig Newmark of Craig’s List, by retaining entrepreneurial control and keeping what many feel is an idiosyncratic focus around the principles of his site, is an exception to this rule, thus far.

Go to the EFF post to find links to the specific Privacy policies.

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The Kelsey Group examines NCI’s DigitalSherpa initiative

by drm on March 12, 2010

Over the past year, the team at NCI has been developing a social marketing service under the umbrella of Digital Sherpa for local advertisers. The service was launched commercially into the multi-family market last August and into the home design market in December.

Our attention over the past months has been focused on executing on our value proposition for our clients. The core of the proposition is to leverage social media tools and content creation and curation in order to expand a customer’s digital footprint. The outcome is increased web traffic through improved Google juice and increased connectedness with their community of interest.

To execute these propositions at a low monthly price to our customers while delivering measurable results, we’ve been building and fine-tuning our business processes and bringing on board a group of talented and enthusiastic professionals excited to pioneer the next wave of internet marketing.

Our activities attracted the attention of a leading analyst in the local media space, Peter Krasilovsky, who heads up the Marketplaces advisory service at The Kelsey Group. Peter asked to look under the hood and has issued summary report about DigitalSherpa.

Here’s how he framed the report in his alert to clients:

Will vertical advertising be replaced, in whole or in part, by search engine optimization? That’s the question companies are grappling with as they consider that many leads are coming from articles and other media that rank high in search results.

NCI, the publisher of The Real Estate Book, Apartment Finder and other publications, isn’t waiting to find out. Throwing worries of cannibalism to the wind, it is building social media content for its advertisers, placing highly contextual articles, abstracts, photos and video on advertiser blogs, Facebook and Twitter.

In his report, Peter poses 5 key questions about the Digital Sherpa service:

  1. Will “content” be a compelling proposition of potential clients, even though the big SMB bets for 2010 are reputation and presence management?
  2. Will DigitalSherpa experience the same high churn that other local internet ad services have experienced with SMB’s?
  3. Can DigitalSherpa develop effective content?
  4. How much content does a service need to develop in order to deliver results to its clients?
  5. What impact will creating DigitalSherpa have on our core customer relationships?

These are great questions. I’m not going to take a stab at answering them now. With close to 1000 clients currently, we’ve going to have data-driven answers to the questions in fairly short order. That will be the time to see how things shake out in this social media marketing experiment.

The Kelsey Report advisory alert is available to subscribers here. If you have questions for Peter, you can find him at his blog, The Local Onliner.

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A case study in building Google Juice: the impact of creating consistent content consistently

January 22, 2010

A basic form of web currency that gets discussed more and more frequently is Google Juice.
Say the words “Google Juice” and people are likely to nod their head knowingly. Getting Google Juice is a dark art, easy to understand and hard to execute. People hear Google Juice and they think, Page 1.
As we’ve [...]

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Another step in the shift around Search

January 4, 2010

In his 2010 projections, John Battelle touches on search:
7. Traditional search results will deteriorate to the point that folks begin to question search’s validity as a service. This does not mean people will stop using search – habits do not die that quickly and search will continue to have significant utility. But we are in [...]

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Winning at search

October 30, 2009

American Express has been running a series of interesting articles on its OpenForum site about how small and medium-sized businesses can leverage social media to their advantage.
A primary theme is that targeted, local businesses can use social media to significantly improve their visibility on search engines. One expert, Jason Falls, points to the [...]

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Two interesting statistics about search techniques and click-thru impact

August 4, 2009

I was reading through an interesting academic paper about a new approach to improving the efficiency of sponsored and organic search performance and came across two interesting statistics.
First, the impact of appearing in the first page of search results in extremely potent. According to analysis conducted by the authors on a data dump from [...]

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