Am I the only one who DISLikes all the tracking, stalking and creepy emotional experiments Facebook does on its members?
Just when I thought Facebook was done coming up with ways to follow me around the internet, today I read about their new joint effort with Nielsen Media Research (NMR) to monitor and track mobile phone users.
By the end of this year, Facebook will be tracking what its members watch on their mobile devices and share information on them to NMR. Supposedly, it’s to help decided the future line up for television programing during the fall.
All of this sharing “will be anonymous and aggregated” so that NMR “won’t have information about individual users.” Right.
Facebook announced last week that they will monitor browsing history from 3rd party sources to use in a new marketing scheme targeting their members, in order to show you more ads for products that you’re more likely to purchase.
So what type of information will they be gathering and tracking? Advertisers and marketing firms can choose attributes such as:
- Location
- Gender
- Ethnic affinity
- Primary language
- Where the user recently moved
- Where the user’s family is located
- Employment
- What you’ve purchased online (Facebook is able to monitor what you purchase online by using browsing history correlated with actual purchases)
This is on the heels of the new feature Facebook added two months ago that listens to users’ background music, movies, or TV shows when they’re writing a status update and will automatically fill in the update with this information.
All of this speaks volumes as to how little “privacy” there is on the Internet, and even less on Facebook.
What would happen if you created your own “emotional experiment” on Facebook and stopped using them for 3 months? How much ad revenues would be lost?
How to Restore Your WordPress Site