Since Zuck and the gang hasn’t been totally honest with us in terms of privacy for the past few years, the recent FTC intervention seems like a long time coming.
Just a day after the seemingly confirmed rumor of an early 2012 IPO with a hundred billion dollar valuation, Facebook and FTC dropped the privacy settlement bomb. The settlement will push facebook to consider their user-privacy obligations and accept FTC scrutiny once in a while seems like an obvious move for facebook if they are really pushing for an IPO early next year. But if this will calm or ick investors, we do not know.
But what about the long term? Facebook is known for their implement first iterate later strategy but with this development, that may actually change. Will this hinder innovation at the company? I certainly hope not. For better or for worse, I still like facebook for their us against the world culture and pushing updates that users hate for a while, love for the rest.
This kind of looks like another one of those Google+ effect. With their good user privacy execution through its use of Circles in sharing texts, links, photos and videos, we had a new idea of sharing through social networks without compromising the privacy of its users.
But what about the ad targeting issue? Facebook claims that they don’t give individual user information and instead use aggregated personal data for its advertisers (which I don’t actually believe by the way, until they release some sort of extensive and believable data/proof to support this). Anyhow, the ads are safe for now, still off the FTC’s radar. And the IPO is a go. Oh, and score one for the privacy nuts.
Photo: adap2k.blogspot.com