Now I’ve never been a big fan of all the free email accounts like hotmail and gmail, having all your email stored by one single central provider is just to much to trust someone with. But predictions are that these are going to be dwarfed by the new email accounts provided by Facebook. After all they have over 500 million members and so much information on each and every user that it is truly scary. We’ve already heard the stories of thieves and burglars using Facebook updates to pick their victims – what could be easier than selecting a user who is updating their status from a bar in Hawaii.
There are of course some huge benefits of using systems like Facebook to communicate if you ignore the security risks. For one a decent world wide spam filter would make email much easier to use. I don’t know about you but even my most prized accounts are starting to get more and more spam, which also entails tightening up filters – inevitably leading to genuine messages getting lost too. To the extent that email is becoming less of the reliable method of communication it once was, you’re never quite sure if an email has been delivered any more.
But the amount of data about each and everyone of us that Facebook will have is very worrying. The power of those Facebook ads you see on the side of your screen will soon overcome the Google adverts. Imagine advertisers being able to target ads so exactly in the case of peoples location, likes, dislikes, demographics and income levels to name just a few. I imagine if you looked at even all the publicly held data on an avid Facebook user you’d get an extremely accurate picture of that individual. Start cross referencing with all the private data like search phrases, fan pages and browsing history and you’ll know more about an individual than their partners.
I’m not saying that this is the intent of Facebook but the temptation in the face of profit potential will be huge. The threats to the privacy of our data grow by the month it seems, and there is little to stop the threat growing.