As Facebook quickly closes in on 500 million members, it has become the Internet’s water cooler.
The social-networking giant’s vast customer base — the equivalent of the world’s third-biggest country, by population — freely shares personal information, which has reset the way many communicate and how advertisers reach them.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is betting that there’s almost no limit to what people will share and to how his company can benefit from it. “Our incentive is to give people the exact controls they want, so they can share the most information,” he says. “More and more people want to share information. That is where the world is going.”
But can too much information be too much of a good thing? Social-networking sites — Facebook, in particular — face heightened scrutiny over their privacy policies from consumers, privacy advocates and legislators.
Some lawmakers are readying legislation to regulate Web sites’ tactics for collecting information about consumers, and the way that information is used to target ads.
Just last month, Facebook held a mea culpa press conference in which Zuckerberg apologized and the company overhauled its admittedly unwieldy privacy controls amid negative user feedback.
The moves quelled some concerns but did not appease privacy advocates, who see an inevitable conflict between Facebook’s treasure trove of user data and the temptation to sell it to advertisers.
“Facebook is in the business of making money, not protecting privacy,” says Nicole Ozer, technology and civil liberties policy director for the ACLU of Northern California. “These latest changes became the right thing for Facebook to do because of mounting pressure from users and Washington.”
Complicating matters, Zuckerberg finds himself at odds with a staff of 200 salespeople who wish to “monetize” the vast personal information of its users, says David Kirkpatrick, author of the new book The Facebook Effect.
“It’s a very difficult juggling…