Apart from your friends and family, who else knows more about you? Google and Facebook, that’s who. Those that follow the movements of Facebook’s business model are voicing deep concerns over their privacy policy, that is to say more their lack of privacy, or default openness.

A while back I wrote about Google‘s ability to track you across the web and ‘learn’ everything they can about you, in order to better targeted you with ads. It has since dawned on me that Facebook are being just as clever, perhaps even more so.

We, all of us, offer a fairly detailed picture of who we are, where we live, where we went to school, how old we are and who are friends are, when we open our account at Facebook. Then some of us will set our privacy settings, just like some of use change the default homepage on our browsers, right? Well for us that did change them, on recent updates of FB they were reset, of course we were told, but I dare say we just dismissed the box and thought nothing more. But we’re all cool with Facebook knowing what we do on the site, after all it is a walled garden, with a poke, here and an event there, what’s the worry. We even get to dismiss ads that aren’t relevant to us, if we even notice them.

All good, right? Seems reasonable to me, after all the ‘free’ service can’t survive without advertising dollars, and if Facebook can make sure ads coming my way are relevant then good for them because that equals more money, which for us means more development, a better site, more functionality and a better user experience.

The swapping of the Fan button with introduction of the Like button, now makes anything you ‘Like’ becomes a part of your profile, dynamically updating. I ‘Like many things but I would say I’m not a ‘Fan’ of many things, this recent change has altered the meaning of the word like. Why is this important? Because now my ‘Likes’ are being stored, remembered and used to profile me. Is that a problem? Depending on your view of privacy I guess it either is or isn’t.

More concerning, although utter brillance on behalf of Facebook is the way that website owners across the internet, including this one, has fan pages, FB like and share buttons. This when logged into your Facebook account (which I know none you you ever log out of, remember you have to actually Log out on Facebook, restarting your computer doesn’t count) means that Facebook, know every site you go on, fan or not, your mere presence is enough.

Facebook now too are learning your habits, the sites you like, plus they already know all that info you gave them on sign up and will continue to give them.

This opens up a new platform for Facebook it move it’s advertising money out of a walled garden into the bloggersphere, potentially offering a rival to Google AdSense. Based on what Facebook knows about you, the advertiser will be willing to pay more than it currently does to Google. Another post for another time I feel.

überRelated links
Does Google care about you and me?
How to quit Facebook – a must read guide.

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