The Pontiflex Blog

The Importance of Being Opt-In: Facebook’s New Privacy Policies

April 26, 2010 at 3:41 pm Roshan Bangera Leave a comment

As Facebook moves to be at the center of the social web, it’s important that they keep consumer trust. At the recent Pontiflex CPL Summit, keynote speaker Imran Khan (Managing Director, JP Morgan) spoke about the importance of trust in social media. “Trust is hard to gain,” he said and “easy to lose.” And there are several new features on the Facebook’s new policies that don’t exactly dial up the needle on the Trustometer:

• A move to opt-out instead of opt-in. You can’t build trust with an opt-out policy. Consumers need to have control over their information, and how it’s being used. Taking this control away is a sure fire means of eroding trust. The industry has been down the opt-out road many a time before to little avail – Facebook’s Beacon comes to mind. We don’t have to go there again.
• The new policies allows apps to retain data collected from Facebook profiles for more than 24 hours (before they were allowed to keep data for up to 24 hours). In the world of the nanosecond, twenty four hours is a very long time.
• Friends can now wittingly or unwittingly share information about you to other apps and their friends. That’s not very friendly behavior, to say the least. (On a side note, here’s a Mashable guide to disabling some of the settings.)

It’s worth noting that when Google Buzz launched, it got a lot of flak for a lot less. But the same criticism that was levied then is valid now. Companies need to have explicit buy-in from consumers when it comes to sharing their personal information. Anything else is wrong. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Unless of course you want your goose cooked.

Entry filed under: Lead Generation, Online Advertising, Social Marketing, Technology Team. Tags: .