Facebook’s Admiral Poindexter moment
By Roderick Jones
Facebook is rarely out of the news these days given its status as the darling of Silicon Valley, but recently the reporting has centered on the badly received, Beacon software system. Facebook introduced this mainly with the idea of allowing targeted advertisements. The idea was/is to track the users online behavior on partner websites such as, Travelocity and share this with their friends within Facebook. Following its introduction a backlash ensued and MoveOn.org organized an online petition to have the Beacon system removed or at least changed to allow an opt-out. Facebook agreed to this and a contrite Mark Zuckerberg blogged his apology. So far so what? Well, 'targeted advertising' is the current holy grail of social networks and Facebook isn’t alone in attempting some sort of analysis of its users online behavior to aim advertising to them.
Doesn’t this all sound reminiscent of Admiral Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness program? The analysis of online behavior was one of TIA’s central points although it was always presented in much more florid language. This of course was also shot down due to privacy issues but now almost all elements of the Internet structure are examining ways to analyze their users behavior in order to better direct advertising to them. While Google has commanded the lions share of online advertising revenues network operators are beginning to examine how to insert themselves into the process by ‘listening in’ to the traffic flowing across their networks to develop a far more precise picture of an Internet users behavior. According to the Wall Street Journal some small telecoms companies are already doing this. The result of all this activity is the likely ad hoc introduction of Total Information Awareness but this time designed to determine what color you would prefer your Christmas socks to be rather than if you represent a potential threat to national security!
The privacy concerns surrounding both TIA and Beacon are legitimate and should be addressed but systems of this kind do have the potential to indicate extremist activity within our virtual worlds. If online behavioral analysis is to be introduced by the network providers and social-network companies, perhaps they could be persuaded to adjust their algorithms to point out the bad guys as well as the shoppers.