“Facebook, tell everyone I like strawberry smoothies.”
Yes, we all have “sophomore yeaaaar” albums on our profiles. We all put down what artists we listen to, or like pages that we are interested in. We have to admit, Facebook has come way too far into our lives for us to stop using it. Its not easy to give up habits, and it has become somewhat of a habit for people to project their lives on a “timeline”, as Facebook calls it.
One thing we don’t realize, or do realize but can’t really do much about, is how exposed our lives are getting. Facebook is redefining the meaning in personal privacy, in that it’s slowly erasing it and replacing the it’s meaning by “something that doesn’t not exist”. Now, Facebook recently announced its new advertising platform, called Atlas, which is mainly designed to surpass Google. Facebook Atlas is designed to allow advertising websites to target specific individuals. The idea is to create customized ads for each individual depending on what they indicate on their profile. Facebook Atlas will allow companies to gain access to the age, marital status, interests, social activity and more characteristics about individuals. This means that every singer that one likes or every event one attends to, these will all be information for advertisers to create customized just for that person.
To better understand the effects of this, we can think of a network graph. Let a person be the central node in the graph. Let’s call the advertising websites nodes around our central node. The main idea is that advertisers would be looking for ways to connect to the main node, or in other words, looking for ways to create links to that person. Before, advertisers could only access the websites one visits, and create ads that were similar to the pages that person visited. With Facebook Atlas, advertising websites will have a chance to gather more information about the person, and this will allow them to connect more links to the central node. For example, let our central person enjoy long walks and like visiting natural parks. From this information, the advertising websites would be able to connect the central node with traveling websites or websites offering comfortable walking shoe at low prices. Furthermore, by the Triadic Closure Property, Atlas would be able to form a connection between the traveling website to the shoe website, and offer the central node comfortable and durable hiking shoes. From the networks point of view, this would mean that with Facebook Atlas, the central node has the chance to get a much strongly connected node, as the two nodes (shoe website and traveling website), also get connected.
Now, what does getting a more strongly connected node mean? Means that advertising companies know more about you. They know what you like, and they know what you want. They can plan their marketing strategies specifically for you. From the advertisement company’s point of view, this is just what they want. Therefore, this is just want Facebook wants. But what about you? Can we be comfortable with our personal information floating around from one company to another? While it certainly sounds disturbing, it is possible to argue that if one is not comfortable with this, one shouldn’t use Facebook at all. So why do we still do it? Considering the ubiquity and popularity of the website, the fact is that it became a social norm to use this website. In other words, we do it because society tells us to.
http://smallbiztrends.com/2014/10/google-versus-facebook-advertising-atlas.html
http://www.adexchanger.com/ad-exchange-news/will-facebooks-atlas-ad-server-alert-privacy-regulators/