"Our business is advertising."

These are the words of Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, from an interview published in the April 20, 2009 issue of BusinessWeek. She continued:

"We believe advertising needs to blend into the experience ... we don't have big banners across the site, nor do we have text-based ads that are really part of the search experience. We have ads that act like our site."

Facebook is the world's premier social networking website. Hundreds of millions of people use it to keep in touch with their friends, families, and associates. These are the relationships and conversations that make human life meaningful. But:

"These naturally occurring social actions now also can be paired with sponsored content and advertising to create a Social Ad."
- Facebook Product Overview FAQ

Facebook is a privately owned company that profits by surreptitiously injecting paid advertisements into its users' human relationships.

"You understand that we may not identify paid communications as such."
- Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. ("By using or accessing Facebook, you agree to this Statement.")

Research firm eMarketer predicts that advertisers will spend $605 million to reach Facebook users in 2010 — a 39% increase from 2009. Marketers are increasingly confident that the money they spend at Facebook will draw consumers to pay for their products and services.

"People treat Facebook as an authentic part of their lives, so you can be sure you are connecting with real people with real interest in your products."
- Facebook case study in a promotional message to advertisers.

People from around the globe login to Facebook hoping to share stories of life, love, hope, and achievement. Facebook's aim is to make them talk about commercial products instead.

"The next hundred years will be different for advertising, and it starts today. ... We are announcing a new advertising system, not about broadcasting messages, about getting into the conversations between people."
- Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, at a press conference on November 6, 2007. Quoted by TechCrunch.

"[Facebook has] put the power of recommendation and referrals into a systematic environment."
- Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook VP-product marketing and operations. Quoted in the November 12, 2007 issue of Advertising Age.

Facebook's entire financial model rests on the fact that its users — or more accurately its used — are willing to display products as prominently as their friends and build their identities out of advertisements. John Doe's Facebook profile does not list his beliefs, his achievements, or his goals. It is not set up to demonstrate his individuality or creativity or personality. It simply lists, "John Doe is a fan of: [insert brands here]." This is exactly how Facebook wants it to be.

"Facebook Pages are designed for businesses and brands to efficiently interact and communicate with users. Through Pages, businesses can engage with their fans and capture new audiences virally through their fans’ recommendations to their friends."
- Facebook Product Overview FAQ.

It doesn't stop here. Third party companies that develop Facebook applications also sell their users to advertisers.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you ever assumed that what you do on the Internet is private unless someone is looking over your shoulder, think again. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has recently published a series of articles about how easily people can be identified online even within the limits set by federal laws and typical web site privacy policies. Although these policies usually promise that any "personally-identifiable information" you share will be kept strictly confidential, they also make exceptions for the supposedly anonymous demographic information you reveal. This includes statistics like your birth date, gender, zip code, and the technical specifications of your computer and web browser. It would be impossible to identify you from just one of these anonymous bits of information. However, the EFF points out that these demographic facts, used in combination, are almost always enough to pinpoint individuals.

For example, in a September blog post, the EFF cited a study at Carnegie Mellon University to show that 87% of Americans have a unique combination of birth date, zip code, and gender. If you live in the United States, that means there is an 87% chance that these three supposedly "anonymous" facts, taken together, are enough to identify you. The less populous your zip code, the more likely that someone can link that data directly to your name. For a more detailed explanation of the mathematics of identifying unique individuals with this kind of demographic information, see the EFF's recent Primer on Information Theory and Privacy.

The technical information that your computer sends to each website you visit reduces your anonymity even further. Websites collect data on the configuration of your computer in order to optimize their own compatibility with your system. However, the high number of unique computer configurations means that few people are likely to be using exactly the same combination of operating system, screen resolution, web browser version, browser plug-ins, and fonts as you are. The EFF has launched a website called Panopticlick that can tell you just how unique your own setup is.

Like a fingerprint, a unique computer configuration can easily be tracked as it hops from web page to web page, even if you have cookies disabled and you have a dynamic IP address. If you share information as limited as your birth date, gender, and zip code at a website where someone connects it with your particular computer setup, that person could potentially track your movement online, gaining clues about your interests, your hobbies, your beliefs, your political opinions, and your friends, while linking this data directly to your name and address. Companies like Acxiom specialize in just this kind of data analysis in order to help advertisers develop targeted marketing campaigns, and to aid credit card and insurance companies in deciding whether or not to provide you their services and at what price.

You may think you have nothing to hide. Privacy isn't just about keeping dirty secrets, however. You can surely think of things in your life that you would be embarrassed to tell certain people. Is that wrong? How many people would tell their parents everything they tell their best friends, or tell their best friends everything they tell their parents, or tell either of these things to their children or their coworkers? The truth doesn't have to be "bad" to be uncomfortable. Think of the secrets you keep with good intentions, to surprise someone or protect someone. Is that wrong? Would you tell a random stranger where you live? Would you give away your email password or your bank account number?

We all have secrets. You have a right to privacy — a right to choose what the world should or should not know about you. Information is power, and information about you is the power to persuade you, to embarrass you, to manipulate you, to rob you, and even to predict you. Laws about privacy are defined by our expectations of privacy. What happens if you don't care what kind of information Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter collect from you? The U.S. Constitution only guarantees against "unreasonable searches and seizures." If you think it's reasonable to be spied on while you're on the web, then how much privacy does the law grant you?

It seems like everyone is on Facebook. Almost everyone. I'm one of the dwindling holdouts, a child of the web who builds computers and designs websites but who doesn't see the attraction of jumping on the social networking bandwagon. I'm not the only holdout. The media has been quick to pounce on Facebook and similar sites over issues like lost privacy and cyber-stalking, and while I think these issues are little more than network ratings fodder, others have taken them to heart. My grievance with Facebook is more fundamental, not at heart a problem with what Facebook does, but a problem with what Facebook is—a monolithic private company that millions of people have chosen to facilitate the most important thing in their lives: their relationships.

"We are building Facebook to make the world more open and transparent," proclaims the Facebook Principles page. "Facebook," it continues, "promotes openness and transparency by giving individuals greater power to share and connect." The page continues to set forth ten principles, which are in truth nothing but marketing buzzwords struck into idealistic sentences that reveal almost nothing about what commitments or services Facebook actually provides. What does Facebook provide? Contradictions, certainly. Click over to the Privacy Policy, also titled Facebook Principles, and you'll see that instead of ten principles, "Facebook follows two core principles" introduced with the sentence, "We built Facebook to make it easy to share information with your friends and people around you." This is a little less idealistic than the last page, but more immediately helpful. Facebook is a service that allows people to share information with the people around them.

People, or so I recall, have mouths for just this purpose.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the greatest things about the Internet, in addition to its convenience, speed, and interactivity, is its open nature. Wheras the "little guy" is often barred from traditional media like printing and broadcasting because of the high costs and deeply-entrenched competition, the Internet offers an inexpensive way for all kinds of people to easily publish their ideas around the globe. While this lack of barriers has allowed for a lot of amateur and low-quality material on the web, it has also provided for the creation of many first-rate publications, some of which might never have existed otherwise. Some of the neatest sites have come from small towns and local neighborhoods where residents have made use of the Internet to strengthen their communities and offer immediate perspectives that can't be rivaled by the bigger, corporate media. Lately I've been finding a lot of websites dedicated to the news, culture, and history of small towns in the region around my home in southwest Wisconsin. I thought I'd share three of my favorites here today:

• The Kickapoo Free Press is an independent monthly magazine from Viroqua, Wisconsin, with a print and online edition. It features in-depth news and thoughtful opinions from the Kickapoo Valley region, and I love its emphasis on cultural and humanistic reporting. The writers for the Kickapoo Free Press do a marvelous job of depicting rural and small-town life in western Wisconsin, and the issues they discuss make this magazine a must-read for anyone with a stake in the region.
• PDC Today is a relatively new website dedicated to covering the latest news from Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, and its neighboring communities. The website features daily updates, along with streaming audio and video of recent news stories in the area. There are also Twitter updates for breaking news and a "Life" section about area events and culture. Overall, PDC Today makes for a great way to stay up to date on what's happening in that part of the state.
• Focus on PDC is another blog from Prairie du Chien, but this one puts more emphasis on yesterday—it's author has been hard at work digging up information on some of the city's lesser known historic sites. Prairie du Chien is well known for its long and eventful history, but some stories tend to crowd out the others. The Focus on PDC blog brings many of these forgotten curiosities into the spotlight with new research on historic people and places.

Be sure to check out these sites if you're a fellow Western-Wisconsinite, and as always, check the Links Page for a complete list of my favorite websites. Also, if you know of any other sites dedicated to the news and culture of small towns in Southwest Wisconsin, leave a comment and let me know.

Whilst traipsing about the Internet, I occasionally discover websites that impress my sensibilities but that fail to impress themselves upon my memory. This is always unfortunate. When I try to relocate these sites, my searches often fall hopelessly short. It makes me feel like the prince who had nothing but a glass slipper by which to find the girl who stole his heart at the ball. Weeks, months, or years pass with no success, and often I completely forget these sites that had so enthralled me. Sometimes, however, I happen upon a lost website again in a chance encounter. Such a reunification, while it doesn't quite permit me to live happily ever after, is still usually rather satisfying. It was by just this kind of chance encounter that I recently rediscovered the site I want to share with you today.

LibriVox.org is a website that offers free audio recordings of classical literature and public domain texts. The project was founded in 2005, it's non-profit and advertising-free, and the audiobooks it offers are recorded by volunteers from around the world. The large and growing catalog of recordings includes works by such fashionable authors as Jane Austen, Geoffrey Chaucer, Oscar Wilde, John Milton, Mark Twain and William Shakespeare—among many others. You can download the audio books as mp3s, or as patent-free and technologically superior Ogg Vorbis files.

Since LibriVox relies on disparate volunteers to produce its recordings, the narration quality varies a lot from book to book and chapter to chapter. Nonetheless, the few speakers I've heard so far had clear diction and easily read with enough dramatic flair to keep my interest. If you think you could do a better job of reading, don't forget that you can volunteer to record books for the site too! I would happily contribute to this project myself if I only had a quiet place to read uninterrupted.

Anyway, I'm very happy to have found this site again. I love to read, but I find that while school is on I am too busy reading for class to ever read for pleasure—I'd have time, I suppose, but not the energy. LibriVox is the perfect solution: it's free, it's online, and audiobooks let me delve into literature for pleasure while giving my eyes a rest after a long session of reading for school. If your situation is similar, I hope you'll give this site a try. Alternatively, old favorite Project Gutenberg is still there for those who prefer just the text. Either way, there's no longer any excuse to keep from experiencing those great old books you've always been meaning to read!

Free audiobooks: LibriVox
Free e-texts: Project Gutenberg