Google and Facebook are both suspected of snooping on data. I am sure companies have been doing this for a while, it’s demographic analysis, taken to another level.
Valleywag is reporting that a Facebook employee allegedly used a universal login to view people’s profiles.
Valleywag: Facebook Employees Know what Profiles You Look At
Facebook’s privacy policy doesn’t explicitly reserve or waive employees’ right to check out your profile for any reason. Of course, the practice still reeks of skunkery — it’s one thing to check profiles in the course of business, but these people are looking up records for kicks. This is a company with $150 million in projected revenues this year and a gigantic ad deal with Microsoft, not a corner video store. The privacy of millions is at stake. Google clearly promises not to crawl through mail or search records with anything but a computer program.
This is not new information. The last bit about Google is interesting too, more on Google down the page.
ValleyWag has some other articles about employees abusing priviledges, and while important they are negligable relative to the macroview of social graph analytics. I wrote in a post (Facebook’s Inside Joke) about a quote by Zuckerberg that said, in effect, ‘we can predict who will be entering a relationship based on variables such as profile views…’. Facebook has been doing this for quite some time, and I think a lot of people are going to be surprised at what Facebook is going to be coming out with in terms of social graph analytical ability.
It’s a reality that even though you have search history paused, Google is still warehousing every search you do. The inferences they will be able to make based on variables such as search frequency, topics, times, ads clicked, ads clicked per search type, etc are downright scary. It is certain that part of Google’s strategy involves top notch psychological and behavior science teams developing increasing and improving advertising distribution areas, algos, and conversion ability.
Google knows about every email I send and receive, my social network as dictated by my email address book, the blogs and news sources I read, my calendar, and, of course, the searches I make. Wow, that’s a lot of data. And yet it happens in such a subtle manner, since most of Google’s services aren’t overtly linked beyond the convenience of the company’s single sign-in and some limited data exchange. However, Google anxiety is compounded by the fact that we know the company snoops on this data, or more accurately, Google’s algorithm does, in order to target ads. (Read more on this from Steve O’Hear here.)
A frequent theme on this site is the fact that privacy will be a very big issue over the next 5 years. It always has been, but with our going forward into cloud computing, OpenID, Social Graph manipulation, it is becoming more and more important to recognize privacy issues and create protection.
What can we do now? You are the gatekeeper for your static information going into a social graph like facebook, or myspace. This is your personal information such as relationship status, likes, dislikes, etc. However, what we have less control over is the monitoring by big firms like Google and Facebook of our use of their services. This is not unlike how I use analytics to follow the customers to my online retails operations, to track a conversion funnel, and increase that conversion. It’s just doing analysis on a higher level- so where do we draw the line and maintain fairness? Are you OK with this analysis being done if it’s by a robot and not a human (as Google has promised to do for privacy?).