CEO’S TESTIMONY PUTS PRIVACY AND DATA IN SPOTLIGHT
Lawmakers may have “liked” getting up close and personal with CEO, but the onus still appears to be on users to protect their privacy data
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance in Washington last week gave lawmakers a chance to grill him on users’ information, but the onus is still on individuals to protect their data.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged that his company’s lax attention hurt user privacy. But as the 33-year-old founder told Congress, the onus is still on users to protect their personal data.
The eerie feeling that a corporation can track your every digital move — and share it — has finally, maybe, awakened consumers that their likes, tweets and other posts are being viewed and gathered by strangers. Of course, this hasn’t been a secret. It has long haunted privacy advocates, well before the recent # Deletefacebook movement. And Zuckerberg’s revelations last week were even more astounding, including that Facebook collects data on people who don’t use Facebook and the company doesn’t know whether other companies abused user data as Cambridge Analytica did.
“Consumers are realizing that Facebook is really monetizing them and really isn’t here to protect their data,” said Robb Reck, the chief information security officer at Denver-based security firm Ping Identity. “This may be the first time they’ve realized it.”
The attention to personal privacy has put a damper on the advertising industry, not to mention convenient features such as Facebook Login that allow people to use their Facebook credentials to access other apps and sites. And Colorado has many advertising agencies and companies that use Facebook login, including doctor-finder Healthgrades.com, mobile app Ibotta and video tutorial site Craftsy.
It’s a touchy topic for companies that do business on Facebook. Many companies contacted for this story declined to talk about what’s next for themselves, their customers and their use of Facebook.
Tam Vu, a computer-science professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder who specializes in mobile systems, said a huge problem is that too many mobile apps and add-ons ask for permissions that don’t make sense — like a game needing to access your entire contact list.
“The way Facebook writes its privacy policy is that it essentially delegates everything to the user,” Vu said. “But if you don’t configure it right, it’s your fault. That’s where the problem is. We trust our friends, but our friends sometimes are not always as cautious about our privacy.”
Reck said that since many of Ping’s clients sell to consumers, those companies find it easier to offer a thirdparty login such as Facebook instead of expecting every new consumer to type a separate password into a tiny form online or on a phone.
“I don’t see my customers turning off the ability to do Facebook as a single sign-on because it’s such a convenient option for their customers,”
Reck said. “I can see them starting to add a note about it that says, ‘Hey, if you do this, this gives Facebook your information.'”
One way around it is to use a company whose business model doesn’t solely rely on advertising. Amazon and Microsoft, for example, collect your data mostly to sell their own stuff to you, he said.
Gleaning data from a user’s likes, friends and posts is key to Facebook’s core business of targetedadvertising, which helped the company make $40.1 billion in revenue last year. Take that away and Facebook needs to find another way to make money. Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg hit the media circuit April 5, when she mentioned one possibility: charging users who don’t want targeted ads.
And that’s not a terrible idea, said Dan Goldstein, the president of Page 1 Solutions, a Lakewood digital marketing company.
“I think people should have to pay to opt out of advertising on platforms like Facebook. Otherwise, you’re taking away commercial property rights from Facebook. It is no different than Hulu, where you can pay not to have ads while you watch a video. Facebook should be no different than that,” Goldstein said in an email.
Goldstein said many of his clients advertise on Facebook so the company relies on the platform’s tools to target users by their demographics. But, he added, “we never actually see the data that Facebook uses to fulfill the advertising orders. It is certain that there will be changes in Facebook’s privacy rules. Those rule changes will impact advertisers on Facebook. In addition, many Facebook users will take steps to protect their private data. However, I do not anticipate that this will prevent advertisers from effective marketing on Facebook.”
Targeting ads to men or women, college students or baby boomers, or to any other demographic that businesses can get their hands on is a huge part of today’s advertising industry for good reason.
“(Advertisers are) using the data and people are saying, ‘Whoa, my ads are a whole lot better,'” said Luke Beatty, the CEO of Brandfolder, which helps companies keep their digital brand and assets updated. “I’m a fly-fisherman and I’m getting fly-fisherman ads. That’s a much better experience than seeing Candy Crush ads.”
The Facebook privacy blowup did make at least one Denver startup rethink its advertising strategy. Colin Mcintosh, the CEO of Sheets and Giggles, said his company doesn’t collect customer data for advertising purposes — only what’s needed to sell and ship bedsheets. The company stores private customer data offline, he said.
Sheets and Giggles decided to ditch its Facebook ads and will instead spend “100 percent of our digital advertising budget on Amazon’s (marketing services) platform,” Mcintosh said in an email. “It’ll be a higher (return on investment) than Facebook ads, and we’ll be happy to wrap up our advertising there.”
Also, he added, “we just want to get into bed with you, not sell your data. Much less invasive.”