FreshNetworks Blog

Facebook Home

Facebook Home, announced last week, is the social network’s latest bid to expand its social web over mobile devices. The Facebook Home app, available on Android phones, integrates the phone’s operating system with the Facebook platform by taking over your home screen with your Facebook news feed  and making SMS messaging look like a Facebook chat. This integration also gives Facebook the potential to mine vastly more information about its users than ever before.

What data can Facebook Home mine from your phone?

1. GPS: According to Gigaom, Facebook’s integration with the Android operating system allows Facebook to receive constant information about the phone user’s whereabouts via the phone’s GPS. From this Facebook could potentially work out things like where you live, based on your phone’s GPS location between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.
2. The phone’s accelerometer: The phone’s accelerometer could tell Facebook whether a phone user is walking, running or driving.  Adding this to the data Facebook already has about you, it can build a much better profile of its users, such as the places you shop, the restaurants you dine in and where you might spend a weekend pursuing your hobbies.
3. Chat Head: Facebook Home will bring together Facebook chat with SMS messages, so that your messages will get Facebook-ified and potentially, through the Android launcher, allow Facebook to read your messages sent outside its service.
4. VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol): Facebook has already been inching into this space for a while, but Facebook Home could bring internet calls via Facebook front and center to a user’s mobile experiences and bypass phone calls altogether.  Facebook calls would mean you wouldn’t have to look up someone’s contact details (Facebook already has them) and you wouldn’t have to pay international rates, giving many incentives to use a Facebook VoIP service. Although Facebook is not likely to actually monitor your calls, it would be able to get a lot of information such who you call, and how long you talk them.

What might it do with this data?

David Jacobs of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) suggests that the increased information available to Facebook via the new app, will help it to monetise your personal information through advertising. Advertisements won’t be in the first release of Facebook Home, but future versions will include an ad feature which gives Facebook an unprecedented opportunity to aggressively push commercial messages at its users.

However, there have been more and more news stories about a potential privacy backlash, as users are trying to weigh up the benefits of sharing increasing amounts of information with the risks of losing their privacy, and the potential damage caused by personal data getting in the wrong hands. As Jan Dawson, senior telecoms analysts at Ovum points out, “users don’t want more advertising or tracking and Facebook wants to do more of both”.

Cosmonaut Memorial (Photo credit: bigglesmith)

Last week I went to a talk by Evgeny Morozov at the Royal Society of Arts on the limits and problems with what he terms ‘technological solutionism’, the subject of his new book To Save Everything, Click Here. It was a brilliant talk, available here, and which I would highly recommend that you listen in full if you have the time.

‘Technological solutionism’ is the idea that many of society’s problems can and should be solved with technological fixes. Take, for example, the obesity epidemic that has swept the developed world. With Nike+ fuel band, a person can now precisely track how much exercise they are doing, and they can count all the calories they eat with nice smartphone apps. This information, shared with their friends and uploaded to online leaderboards and social profiles, will then spur them to keep fit and eat more healthily through gamified incentives.

Whilst this is just one small example, you only need to browse Tech Crunch or Wired (most recently with Brain scans predict which criminals are most likely to reoffend) to see the plethora of apps, initiatives and claims that technology and the internet will lead us to a better, cleaner future. As Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, said: “in the future… if we get this right, I believe we can fix all the world’s problems.”

There are, however, a few problems with this ideology:

1. An excuse to push away responsibility for society’s problems: If you take this ideology to its logical conclusions, then proper political and societal discussion of serious issues is side-lined, and the onus for solving them is either outsourced to Silicon Valley or onto individual people. To take the obesity example, questions about advertising of junk food, the proliferation of high fructose corn syrup, or the lack of free sport facilities, are all pushed aside in favour of placing the responsibility solely on individuals. Because now they know exactly how many calories they eat, miles they walk, and can see how much better their friends are doing. So if they’re still fat, well, it’s all their fault.
2. That it makes people overlook the slow erosion of their privacy: What a great deal of these technological solutions have in common is their use of data, either on an individual basis or in aggregate, in ways that many people do not fully realise or understand. Whilst there has been some public debate about this, such as court cases in Germany over Google Street View, much more slips under the radar. Lending companies, such as Lenddo in Hong Kong, base some of their criteria for giving a loan on the applicant’s social profiles, including who they are friends with. Anecdotally, it can be difficult to rent an apartment in parts of New York without a Facebook profile to prove you’re not the wrong kind of person.

These are just a few examples, and can be seen as the thin end of a wedge. In the future the hidden financial and social costs to not sharing your data, and the amount of your data that is used without your knowledge or consent, is likely to continue to grow. More of society’s problems could be pushed superficially either onto individuals or out to tech and data companies rather than being deeply discussed.

One of the main reasons that these quite serious changes in society are being glossed over is that most people implicitly accept the technological utopianism of companies like Google. They are viewed as somehow benevolent, rather than just a business. A business that does not necessarily want to help you, but wants, first of all, to make money from your data.

Hello!! (Photo credit: I_Believe_)

Only 10% of European consumers trust posts by brands on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter; in North America this number increases to 15%. This is the finding of new research from Forrester. It shows that consumer trust of brands in social media is still much lower than the trust they have for their friends and the posts they make.

The research, based on a sample of 20,788 (and 63,703 North American) European online consumers, was published by Forrester this week and explores how consumers react to different marketing messages and types of content.

Overall the message is clear – consumers trust content they go out to find (from expert reviews to recommendations from friends and family) than they do content that is pushed at them. Interruptive advertising such as marketing text messages and banner ads perform worst from a trust perspective. Posts by brands on Twitter and Facebook are the fourth least trusted source of information.

There is much brands can learn from this and from how they seek to build relationships online. The nature of social media is that it is about interaction and that it allows consumers to build their own networks or communities of people with whom they share common interests. And it can be difficult for brands to truly engage here.

Many consumers treat what brands say as they treat advertising – it is something that interrupts them when they are doing something else, and they treat it with a healthy level of scepticism. This is reinforced by the way many brands use these channels – promoting offers or discounts or new products to consumers.

For brands that truly engage in social the trust levels will be much higher. These brands are not using it for interruptive messages to to be part of consumers networks and communities, part of their shared interests. This is not easy to achieve and may not even be relevant for all brands, but with such trust can come real benefits.

In a world where we can learn so much from interacting with consumers and from seeing what they say, like and who they interact with, it is important that we earn their trust. Otherwise, there is a real risk that consumers block brands from their social media life; stop them seeing their data and stop them from understanding more about them.

Trust is important in social media and it comes from real engagement, not interruptive messages.

Just say no to evil (Photo credit: Jean-François Chénier)

Facebook yesterday launched a significant refresh of its News Feed – the main way most people interact with content on the social network. The changes give images a more central role in the user experience (which makes sense as almost 50% of the content shared on Facebook is now visual). And there are now more options to tailor your feed – including the option to get updates just from your friends. Herein lies the real challenge to brands – Facebook has just created a way for people to filter out all your content.

There are many benefits of the new Facebook News Feed for brands that are being discussed, notably:

1. Having a wider canvas to play with – by hiding the left hand navigation content behind a tab (like on the Facebook mobile app), they are offering everybody more space to play with. For brands this will create more space for them to be creative with the content they post and will increase the importance of imagery in their content plan.
2. Creating a similar experience across mobile and web – the new design unifies the experience across web and mobile – making it simpler for brands to design campaigns that work across platforms.

But, will these benefits be realised if people can just filter out your content in the first place?

Given the option to filter to just see updates from actual Friends, we must expect that many users would opt for this. Indeed research shows that the users unlike brands on Facebook because they ‘clutter up my News Feed’ – Facebook has just given people an easy way to remove this ‘clutter’.

This is serious for brands  who are using Facebook as an engagement mechanism – people consume brand information from the News Feed and not from individual brand pages. Now they might not consume your information at all. Unless, of course, you pay.

Advertising and sponsored posts will now also look more beautiful and be able to take advantage of the greater space available to them. For many brands these may now be the vehicle to make people aware of their page and of the content they share on Facebook.

green for sale sign (Photo credit: Diana Parkhouse)

As we discussed in a recent posts, we are all leaving increasingly large data exhausts behind us online, as we perform searches, visit websites, execute transactions, use apps on our mobile phone, connect and share on social media. The vast volume of data that businesses are building up on us is a treasure trove for marketers, enabling them to better understand us, predict our preferences and behaviours, and take actions to bind us closer to their brands and encourage us to purchase their products.

When these actions are done effectively they can surprise and delight us, but a miscalculation can soon make us question what data businesses are holding on us, and how is that data being used.

Is a privacy backlash coming?

There is much debate as to whether a major privacy backlash is looming just round the corner, or whether a much more permissive attitude towards openness and sharing of data will prevail as new digital native generations grow up. Some people are also starting to recognise the value of their own data and the next logical question is to challenge who is currently making money from my data? Why not me?

Who is making money from my data?

The answer to the first part is easy, it is currently the platforms – notably Facebook, Google, Twitter, but also app providers. For example, consider the data set that Nike is accumulating through its Nike+ ecosystem of products. It knows exactly how often you run, for how long, at what speed, in what places, and with whom. It could know how well your heart is performing during your exercise. This is interesting and valuable information for you as a consumer as it can help you set goals and track your progress. It is also a goldmine of data for Nike. At its most basic, Nike now knows when it should be subtly recommending that you replace your worn out running shoes. Hypothetically, I wouldn’t be surprised if the data could be used to predict your probability of suffering a heart attack. I am not suggesting that Nike do this, but given sufficient volumes of data you can start to pull out the patterns and predict future outcomes. What if your life insurer had access to that same data?

Personalisation is therefore a double-edged sword; it can deliver valuable tailored products and services that we love, but it can also feel intrusive and even exclude us from things that maybe we would have had access to in a less data rich environment. So do we lie back, log out, or try to take control?

Data-lockers and how consumers could profit from their data

European legislation currently being debated would significantly increase the regulation in this domain, preventing companies from using your data with 3rd parties without your explicit consent. It seeks to force much greater transparency on what information is being collected about you, and what it is being used for. The internet titans are waging an unprecedented lobbying campaign (linked page in Spanish) to prevent this legislation from seeing the light of day, as it would probably force a radical shift in their business models.

Numerous start-ups are trying to find opportunities in this landscape with services such as “data lockers” – where you can deposit your personal data and grant access to businesses to selected areas. This opens up the possibilities of services such as reverse price comparison, where you invite companies to give you the best offer on the data that you opt to share. Maybe you could even receive direct remuneration for opening up your personal data – the more comprehensive it is or the more interesting your profile is to businesses, the higher the rewards for you. The UK’s midata initiative, which gives consumers a portable copy of their data so that they can take it elsewhere and try and get a better deal, also falls into this space. These are exciting ideas, but the question is – who is positioned to deliver these services? Would you entrust your data to a small start-up? A lot of the most valuable data is currently sitting on the servers of the huge corporations, whose value is directly linked to how many consumers are on their platform and how well they enable third parties to use that data.

Trust and transparency will determine who the winners are that emerge from all this. As companies seek to explore and expand big data projects these are critical areas of consideration.