Dark Clouds - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 148

most proitable use of information about its users derived from their posts
on its site. Rolling out this model has created problems for the company
because each step in the process encroaches on Facebook's own privacy
policy, which it initially used to attract and keep users. This began when
the social networking site introduced advertising on user pages. To attract
more advertisers and justify charging them more, it allowed companies
to direct ads to users based on what they post to their page. Since my
page describes me as a Canadian, I receive ads from Canadian companies,
but since I also post links from the New York Times , the newspaper that
delivers all the news that's it to print also sends me ads. The next step
was to vastly expand the information Facebook gathers on users by mak-
ing deals with large data vendors that collect and manage information
on users' ofline purchases. This enables the social-media giant to match
ofline purchasing data with information that users post to provide a
more complete guide to advertisers who want to better target users with
ads. Member proiles, advertiser records, and ofline databases provided
by third parties are anonymously matched through user email addresses
and phone numbers to improve targeting. Each step in the privacy erosion
dance meets with a negative reaction from privacy advocates. In this case
the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy immediately
alerted the Federal Trade Commission, the Government Accountability
Ofice, and key lawmakers who work on privacy policy because “clearly
the integration of these powerful databases and purchasing records to be
used for targeting is a serious privacy concern and needs to be investigated.
We need new privacy controls and marketing policies to protect sensitive
information” (Bachman 2013).
Even though it must abide by a twenty-year consent decree with the
Federal Trade Commission to give users clear and prominent notice and
obtain their consent before sharing information beyond its privacy set-
tings, Facebook pushed its commercialization project a major step forward
with the introduction of Graph Search, its challenge to Google and, some
would add, its challenge to privacy. The service, which began a rollout
in 2013, takes every post, including pictures, likes and dislikes, age and
birth date, schools attended, work history, sexual orientation, political
views, religious preference, and comments on members' own and other
sites. It combines this information with public data available to users of
a conventional search engine, puts them in a database, and makes use