Business and social networking – honeymoon over?
Jinfo Blog

25th May 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

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In view of Facebook’s recent privacy debacle, it’s perhaps not surprising that people are now far more likely to give only their friends access to their social networking profiles than they were a couple of years ago. But the seeds of this crisis were planted well before the Facebook affair broke – and they call into question much of the rationale for exploiting social networks for business purposes. Eighty per cent of people say they now have a profile that can be viewed only by their friends, compared with just 48% in 2007, according to the Ofcom report UK Adults’ Media Literacy (link to report from http://digbig.com/5bbqmx). The research was carried out in spring and autumn 2009, but the report’s publication now could scarcely be more timely. It’s been a pretty terrible few weeks for Facebook, culminating in a public rebuke from the Article 29 group of European data protection authorities, which branded its changing of privacy default settings ‘unacceptable’ (http://digbig.com/5bbqnc). ‘We just missed the mark’, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg ruefully admitted in the Washington Post (http://digbig.com/5bbqnd) – but the troubles of social networking sites generally go much deeper. Research by AT&T Labs and Worcester Polytechnic, Massachusetts, has revealed that ‘leakage’ from sites including LinkedIn, Digg and Twitter can result in personal URLs – those which identify individuals – being inadvertently shared with advertisers (research report at http://digbig.com/5bbqne – more accessible summary from Ars Technica at http://digbig.com/5bbqng). And New Scientist magazine reports that a team at the Vienna University of Technology has built an experimental web site to identify individual users of the business-orientated Xing site by analysing the overlaps between the social network membership groups they belong to (http://digbig.com/5bbqnh for the article or http://digbig.com/5bbqnk for the experiment itself). So what are the implications? Firstly, the authorities are getting much tougher on the sanctity of personal information, with new European Union model clauses governing the export of personal data outside the European Economic Area (http://digbig.com/5bbqnm for the official text or http://digbig.com/5bbqnn for the Out-Law newsletter’s explanation). Add to that the fact that fewer people are choosing to reveal themselves online, and that must militate against, for example, use of social sites for recruitment checking purposes (see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27071). If sites are not representative then their market research value has to be questioned too; Nancy Davis Kho reported last year that youngsters were being ousted on Facebook by baby-boomers, skewing the assumed demographic (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e21704). But the Ofcom media literacy report now also shows that women are far more likely to have set up a social networking profile than men, many of whom just aren’t interested. Social networks only work for business if they deliver scale and a representative sample. Looks as if the honeymoon may be over.

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