Wednesday, January 22, 2014

I'm watching you, watching me... (Part 2)

I posted a blog entry a while ago about the LinkedIn feature that allows me to see who has viewed my profile. In that post, I made a passing reference to Facebook, and wondered what would happen if they did the same thing. Since writing that, my mind has been stuck on this notion, and it's gotten me completely distracted. So I need to get this out of my system.

Facebook. It's a lovely tool for sharing photos and saying what's on your mind, but who hasn't used it to secretly peak into the lives of someone else? We can use Facebook like this is because it allows our voyeurism to remain a secret from the target individual (unlike LinkedIn).

But what if that changed? We know that Facebook has the data - they know who viewed whose profile and when. What's keeping Facebook from one day exposing that information?

Did you just turn pale?  The thought of your ex-whatevers knowing that you were poking around their Facebook page is horrifying, no?

Well, if we know that Facebook has this data and that this data has value, why do we assume that they would not want to capitalize on it? They are, after all, a public company now - answering primarily to their shareholders - and shareholders want return on investment.

So, if Facebook decided to cash in on this data, how would they do it? I imagine they could do two things;
1- Announce to the Facebook community that they will be exposing this data and, if you want to have your view history kept secret, you can pay a fee. 

2- Announce to the members that, if they want to see who has been viewing their profile, they can pay a fee.

With this approach, they'd have thousands of people deleting their profiles completely, and a whole lot of people who are willing to pay to a) keep their activity private and b) see who's been looking at their profile.

From the Facebook Data Use Policy at the time of this writing: 

Granting us permission to use your information not only allows us to provide Facebook as it exists today, but it also allows us to provide you with innovative features and services we develop in the future that use the information we receive about you in new ways.

"The information" could be anything they gather, which is everything. "Innovative features" could be a fee-based service that shows you who's been poking around your profile and/or keeps your activity a secret.

Of course I have no idea if this will ever happen - but it could. 

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