Facebook received bad press yet again last week, after its internet.org fiasco in India, several months back. You might have got a notification on your Whatsapp that the 'terms and conditions' had changed and you'd need to 'accept' them to continue using the services. One of the key changes in this was the user's implicit permission to let FB use their Whatsapp profile info to sell more targeted ads on your Facebook account.
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| Image source: Techcrunch |
And, this created considerable outrage, with a lot of messages going viral (within whatsapp!). There were talks of privacy breaches and how Facebook has started invading more spheres of our private lives. The messages also educated users with a simple set of steps on how to turn this setting 'off' in Whatsapp.
If for a moment you take a dispassionate look at the whole thing, it doesn't appear to be so alarming. Here is a parent company (Facebook) trying to cross-leverage its presence and services with a subsidiary (Whatsapp, which it bought for a bomb of $20 Billion), to better monetize the user base. The users were anyway getting both the services for free. And the new terms clearly stated that only the whatsapp user profile details would be used and none of the chats, groups or other interests would be shared.
Then why the outrage? Its not new in the B2C space for companies to cross-leverage or cross-sell services across their spectrum of products or subsidiaries. Take Google for instance, who has systematically achieved deep integration amongst their wide gamut of products, wherein consumer intelligence from one product enriches the others. But, the fundamental difference here is that the features for the user have always come in first and hence have been well received (though not without its share of suspicion); like the smart Google Now that simplifies your life. Facebook has erred by putting the carriage before the horse, and attempted to monetize first without linking the two for user's gain.
This apart, a side issue has been the perceived dishonesty or malicious intent in the way users have seen FB roll this out. The nature of an implicit, hidden agreement that kicks in when a user 'accepts' T&C certainly didn't help. When you try checking-off the box to disagree on usage of your profile info for ads, the prompt checks 'Are you sure you want to do this? You'll never be able to change this ever again'. Why should this sound like a once-in-a-lifetime favor that FB is doing you. After all, its a user preference and one might be okay to go back and enable the link when they see some benefits coming their way.
Finally, another undercurrent for all of this is the extremely accurate and targeted nature of the ads on Facebook, which has put off a lot of people. Actually this is one area FB must be congratulated for the accuracy they've managed with their algorithms! Unfortunately, the market at large doesn't see it that way. The advances in analytics have been exponential in a brief span of time in an unregulated market, that unpeople haven't been able to fathom it yet.
A personalized recommendation is not seen as a smart salesperson suggesting just-the-right product, but rather like an intruder who has not only got into your house without permission, but has setup a canopy right in your living room to sell stuff by overhearing what you talk to your family!
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