Facebook is being investigated by the European Commission right now because of privacy concerns with their users.
The European Commission is trying to ban targeted ads to users unless the user specifically allows it. If Facebook doesn’t comply with whatever the commission wants them to they will face huge fines as well as legal action. This could be really bad news for the large social network considering this is their main source of income right now. They would literally have to change their whole business model and the way they make money. As many of you know, Facebook is planning on going public and this could totally screw them. Not to mention it would screw a lot of online PPC gurus like you and me.
So what should we be worried about?
Facebook stores everything that users put up on it’s site.. If you like something on Facebook, it is tracked. If you send a message to a friend and delete it a week later, it’s still stored and tracked. If you instant message an old co-worker using the Facebook Chat feature, this information is stored and tracked even after your finish your conversation. If you put that you are a Republican and then change it to Independent a year later, this is tracked. Everything you don is tracked. All this information is used by people like you and me to track users on Facebook.
If you are advertising on Facebook (which you totally should be cause It rocks) you should be scared of this passing. It would mean that you would lose the majority of those nice little targeting devices as seen in the photo below. You basically wouldn’t be able to dial down an advertising campaign to a lot of 10 people. Not that any of you do, but I do. I target specific CEO’s of companies for a cloud hosting client of mine.
You would no longer be able to target people in small geographical areas. This would be really bad for the majority of people that are advertising online through Facebook. Let’s all stand up for this and try and get these little buggers out of here so we can keep targeting people online in the way that we want too. It’s important and we should be able to target in any way possible. Facebook has already stopped the majority of the scammers out there. Not saying we are scamming people but we are marketing to people. We are putting up very legitimate and reliant ads to Facebook users. And paying Facebook well for this ability to target. This would totally screw Facebook and their revenues if this happened.
