If you were Mark Zuckerberg today, you’d be forgiven for extending your Memorial Day vacation an extra 24 hours and do whatever it is you would do for fun if you were Mark Zuckerberg
Weeks of getting pounded in the media over your company’s approach to privacy had amounted to nothing more a particularly pesky meme that, finally, seems to have run out of steam. Quit Facebook Day came and went, with just over 34,000 announcing their decisions to sign off of the social network. That represents .0000755556 of Facebook’s total user base of 450 million. Surely many more have deactivated their accounts recently, albeit without any public declaration, and it’s a bit arbitrary to call the game for Facebook just because a gimmicky event didn’t result in a user hemorrhage of MySpaceian proportions. But it’s pretty certain that Zuckerberg and company, despite some dubious decision-making and awful PR, have faced down their biggest challenge and won.
If you’re a online marketer or agency or publisher, it should be equally obvious from all this hubbub that privacy is not a groundswell issue, at least not in regard to digital media. Betty White on Saturday Night Live. Bieber. Oil Spills. Those are all phenomena that rile people up. Privacy, so abstract and malleable, isn’t and, I think, it’s an issue that’s not as important to people as many would believe. As a result, the companies we all rely on aren’t held to as high a standard as maybe they should be — and hence for years have abused the power that comes from having so much of our information. Basically, you’re not a member if the Fortune 500 if you haven’t loosed a significant number of credit card or social security numbers into the world.
But that doesn’t mean privacy isn’t an issue.
The conclusion of the Facebook saga should be both a source of solace and a brisk reminder of the responsibility digital media and marketing complex has to its consumers. Along with the flaccid regulatory environment around privacy issues, the arc of story tells me that the market for customer data and preference will be a self-regulating, self-policing one, not unlike the financial markets in recent years–though, hopefully with better results. This is just reinforced by the relative softness of a proposed bill by Rep. Rick Boucher that would mandate that ad networks notify consumers that they’re being targeted and allow them to opt out. Much to the dismay of privacy watchdogs, there’s little evidence of any appetite in Congress to really crack down on ad targeting, as Europe has done.
To be sure, there will be plenty of room for commercial platforms that make ads better and more effective and customer acquisition and e-commerce more efficient. Basic targeting now is still pretty miserable, as the ad slop that comes across my Facebook page constantly reminds me. I’m happy to have better commercial options that are relevant to my profile, and I think others would agree. Let’s face it, you’re gonna get an ad one way or the other, why not make it a relevant one? But there will also be “innovations” — if I may use Wall Street’s shading on the term — that go too far simply because they can. To some degree, it will be on the online media business to, in contrast to their financial cousins, use good judgment and not contribute to their own demise.
A good place to start is with disclosure and consumer control, including easy opt-out, as the Boucher draft proposal mandates. There’s no reason consumers shouldn’t have both clear information about targeting techniques and where information is being shared and the ability to elude them. This may sound pie-in-the-sky, but it’s what Facebook learned this month, only after a long and presumably painful backlash. There’s no reason to repeat its mistakes.
