Internet users provide social networking sites with an unlimited amount of personal data. Marketers and other organizations such as the government can obtain information as the user creates their profile and personalizes their webpage.
Social networking sites such as Facebook allow us to keep in touch with family and friends. But are we exposing too much personal information on the web? People may feel like their personal information is only available to friends that they have accepted on their site. However, are users really in control of who views their profile? According to Giselle Abramovich from the DM news, Social networking site MySpace has launched an initiative to capture personal information from the profile pages and blogs of its 110 million active users, and then use that to target ads.
Internet users need to be aware of the privacy issues within social networks. “Marketers can now easily extract information from these sites and use them for data mining purposes. There is a tremendous amount of insight from the collective user data on social networking sites, such as MySpace. The information users post about themselves, their likes and dislikes and how and where they spend their time and money, can all be mined and used for improved targeting”, according to Solomon.
If people are concerned about privacy then they should not be posting private or personal information on their profile. Especially now since “social networking site Facebook, has changed tack and begun to publicly list members’ profiles on search engines such as Google and Yahoo!” (Google News)
With the new PIPEDA Act that was recently past by Canadian legislation, companies should be informing the person if there is a possibility that their information could be used for research purposes.
Resources
PC World
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,137331-c,onlineprivacy/article.html
Google News
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5iWsMIytjvcGtnN9Q6ob6X3YHC3BQ
DM News
http://www.dmnews.com/cms/dm-news/internet-marketing/42509.html
Data Mining Solutions
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue2_5/maxwell/index.html
Wired Online Magazine
