Okay, okay, I can’t even keep up the pretense: I don’t hate Facebook. At all. In fact, I love Facebook.
Imagine this: all of the people in your life, past and present, available to you at the touch of a mouse. For free. For someone like me, a work-at-home mom who is pretty isolated in the country, but has befriended hundreds during different times in her life, it’s catnip. All of my Facebook friends are folks that I have known at some point in my life or other; a collage of my real-life social history. And Facebook offers the perfect platform to be able to interact with all of them – since I have joined, I have been privvy to all sorts of things in my friends’ lives that I would have previously been out of the loop for: Marriages beginning and ending, sons and daughters being born, relatives passing, health problems and concerns, moving….the list goes on. So yes, for this I love you, Facebook. To institute some kind of pay structure would surely alter this lovely landscape.
But Facebook can’t exist purely for our entertainment. To exist, it must make money. And like radio and TV before it, that revenue comes from advertising. But the rub is different with Facebook. The relationship between advertiser and Facebook user does not stop, as with TV, at the screen. Because of the very nature of Facebook, advertisers have our number. They become privvy to all kinds of information that previous generations of advertising companies could only guess about. Who our friends are. Who our favorite actors are. How old we are. What we do for a living. Do we care? Should we care? Is the sacrifice of this information better than paying for the service in more traditional ways (i.e. cash)?
I’m picking on Facebook here. But it is one of the web’s most successful stories that has adopted this “pay with information” model. Far more online entities have also been doing it with great success; among them, a little outfit called Google. Has this become the new answer to the longstanding question of how to monetize the web? I really really hope not, and think there are better models out there.
Daniel Lyons recently wrote about the problem of buying things with privacy in Newsweek: “With money, five bucks is five bucks. But what is the value of your list of friends? …if it’s incredibly valuable, you’re getting massively ripped off.” And more and more, online businesses that are geared toward gathering data and private information are flourishing: from an Alice.com that tracks your shopping needs, to a Mozy.com that backs up your files online. For most of these services, an approximation of what we are paying, in the form of a privacy agreement, is available to us at signup. But who among us reads carefully enough through the fine print in order to quantify this price?
Very very few, as evidenced by a recent story regarding the accidental sale of 7500 souls to an online gaming site. “The retailer, British firm GameStation, added the “immortal soul clause” to the contract signed before making any online purchases earlier this month. It states that customers grant the company the right to claim their soul”. This is certainly a humorous and rather extreme example, but if GameStation can slide this practical joke into their fine print and make away with 7500 souls, it does beg the question about what larger and more nefarious companies might also be able to do.
Lyons wraps his Newsweek piece in the following way, a near perfect-pitch admonishment to pay attention to how ideas of payment and privacy are changing: “Only the techies know how much your info is worth, and they’re not telling. But the fact that they’d rather get your data than your dollars tells you all you need to know”.