Recently the social networking site Facebook survived a fiasco with its Beacon project. If you were a member of Facebook and, e.g., rented a movie from Blockbuster online, Beacon broadcast that fact to all your Facebook "friends" (a bit of Facebook jargon meaning "people to whom you have elected to reveal certain limited information") without your consent. This provoked a backlash against Facebook, which dropped the program in response to a revolt by its customers. So far Blockbuster hasn't been sued, even though there's a decent-sounding legal theory that what Blockbuster did was illegal.
Google has a product called Reader, which allows people to share documents online. I've only glanced at it for the first time today, and was quite surprised to see that some of my "friends" (again, "friends" as defined by Google's technical definition, not by my own) had placed documents online for me to read. Not that I was interested in them, mind you. Google recently — and suddenly — changed how the documents are shared. Instead of sharing them with a few select individuals, the documents you placed into Reader are now available to everyone on your Gmail (Google email) contact list.
Well, as can be imagined, this provoked quite a backlash from users. People who rely on Google for their business and personal email now suddenly find that Google is sharing documents inappropriately — with gaffes ranging from sharing personal husband-wife communications with business contacts, or sharing confidential business information with business rivals.
There's a few lessons here. First, that social-networking sites sometimes forget that in the real world, not all network contacts are the same — people disaggregate their contacts into groups and don't treat them all equally. Second, social networking web sites live and die by the number of contacts, and therefore have the incentive to continually push you to share more and more information and increase the number of contacts. Finally, if you want to avoid gaffes such as the one that Google just committed, you must retain control over your own data; if you put your business data into the hands of Google there's no guarantee that Google will always act in ways that conform to your business preferences and personal expectations.
Topics: · internet · marketing
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