Facebook is Changing the Very Fabric of Privacy

Is Facebook trying to take over the world? Probably not. They are "just" trying to monetize the largest collection of personal user data in the world. The question is "how?"

While Google is a very profitable business based on Internet advertising, it makes most of its money on keywords where people are actively looking to buy something. Facebook's problem is that nobody ever goes to facebook.com to buy anything. Users are just looking to catch up with their friends.

Chris Dixon expects them to work around this by moving traditional brand advertising to the web:

It is widely believed that Facebook will soon follow the AdSense playbook by introducing an off-property ad network. They’ll try to use their strong base of advertisers to dominate intent generating ads the way AdSense dominated intent harvesting ads.
chris dixon's blog

Because brand display advertising on the web has very low click-through rates, however, this is not a very lucrative monetization strategy. Unless, that is, ads can be hyper-targeted to their audience. Chris suggests that Facebook is trying to do that by finding out more about your taste by letting you "Like" all kinds of stuff on the web.

But I am more interested in how this plays into Facebook's privacy strategy: step by step, Facebook is making it harder to keep your data private. Privacy settings are becoming more complicated and default settings are becoming ever looser. Why?

Mark Zuckerberg, the man who is famously refusing to sell his company even at multi-billion-dollar valuations, is clearly on a mission to change the world. I found this to be a very salient quote:

"You have one identity... The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly... Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity" – Zuckerberg, 2009
via This is going to be BIG

And once these barriers are broken down nothing stands between your detailed personal data and an extremely targeted and lucrative ad. But do we really care? On the one hand, a privacy-conscious potential rival gets lots of attention and funding -- but on the other hand, Facebook is growing like a weed and has just crossed the 500-million-user-mark. Mark Zuckerberg just might end up changing the world after all...