Here is a catch 22. In a sufficiently competitive environment, "it's profitable to do X" quickly becomes "It's essential to do X."
Here is a contrived example that doesn't reflect reality:
There are 10 banks in a market. The banks have a range of new online services. Adoption of as many of these services as possible is the key to success. A viable strategy is to retarget customers (segmented by income/family status and other things that make certain services relevant) and tell them about various services. This increases the adoption of value add services substantially.
If one bank takes a moral stance, they either need to live with lower adoption of their services or spend more via less effective advertising channels.
If Facebook advertising is good enough, that one bank would go out of business, have its management replaced by shareholders or get bought out by one of the others.
This probably doesn't apply to banks, but there are businesses where effective online advertising is the difference between success and failure. All the tourist/hotel/flight booking sites, for example.
In that scenario, not violating your users' privacy would become a differentiator for your product, something you could market. Ever noticed how much advertising in highly competitive businesses seem to hinge on ever more strained explanations of how one product is different from the other?
Except, of course (and this is probably the ugly truth) - as long as Facebook doesn't do creepy/embarrassing things or otherwise actively annoy their customers, the vast, vast majority of customers just doesn't care. And then there isn't really a problem.
Privacy is very much a market for lemons. Lets take two scenarios and see which is more profitable.
1. Respect privacy.
2. Carefully mislead the customer to believe the company respects user privacy in a way their fuzzy morals tell them isn't a "lie," bury the truth in the fine print. Lose the handful of customers both technically savvy, principled and capable enough to not use the product while profiting from abusing the privacy of their users.
Your second paragraph explains it. As long as companies are sufficiently non-creepy in their privacy invasion (or at least APPEAR to be such), then the only people who will care are cypherpunks and privacy nerds, who don't form a large part of the market. The "masses" usually go for the latest shiny toy.
You're not allowed to break my facetious example by adding your own facetious information! :)
This is true in some cases, false in others. If you have 8 years worth of emails, that's what you have. If you want to segment your data based on info in your DB (people with & without a mortgage), you will probably need to use emails.
In any case, you are still leaking data. FB now know that your customer is John Lennon.
The email in this case is somewhat trivial. It serves as a userID. If you are super concerned with giving away an email, there are services like LiveRamp that can translate that into an anonymous audience ID for use with your DMP and/or DSP so you target the ID without handing over the email.
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Here is a catch 22. In a sufficiently competitive environment, "it's profitable to do X" quickly becomes "It's essential to do X."
Here is a contrived example that doesn't reflect reality:
There are 10 banks in a market. The banks have a range of new online services. Adoption of as many of these services as possible is the key to success. A viable strategy is to retarget customers (segmented by income/family status and other things that make certain services relevant) and tell them about various services. This increases the adoption of value add services substantially.
If one bank takes a moral stance, they either need to live with lower adoption of their services or spend more via less effective advertising channels.
If Facebook advertising is good enough, that one bank would go out of business, have its management replaced by shareholders or get bought out by one of the others.
This probably doesn't apply to banks, but there are businesses where effective online advertising is the difference between success and failure. All the tourist/hotel/flight booking sites, for example.
In that scenario, not violating your users' privacy would become a differentiator for your product, something you could market. Ever noticed how much advertising in highly competitive businesses seem to hinge on ever more strained explanations of how one product is different from the other?
Except, of course (and this is probably the ugly truth) - as long as Facebook doesn't do creepy/embarrassing things or otherwise actively annoy their customers, the vast, vast majority of customers just doesn't care. And then there isn't really a problem.
Privacy is very much a market for lemons. Lets take two scenarios and see which is more profitable.
1. Respect privacy.
2. Carefully mislead the customer to believe the company respects user privacy in a way their fuzzy morals tell them isn't a "lie," bury the truth in the fine print. Lose the handful of customers both technically savvy, principled and capable enough to not use the product while profiting from abusing the privacy of their users.
Your second paragraph explains it. As long as companies are sufficiently non-creepy in their privacy invasion (or at least APPEAR to be such), then the only people who will care are cypherpunks and privacy nerds, who don't form a large part of the market. The "masses" usually go for the latest shiny toy.
You can re-target users on various ad networks without using their e-mail addresses.
You're not allowed to break my facetious example by adding your own facetious information! :)
This is true in some cases, false in others. If you have 8 years worth of emails, that's what you have. If you want to segment your data based on info in your DB (people with & without a mortgage), you will probably need to use emails.
In any case, you are still leaking data. FB now know that your customer is John Lennon.
The email in this case is somewhat trivial. It serves as a userID. If you are super concerned with giving away an email, there are services like LiveRamp that can translate that into an anonymous audience ID for use with your DMP and/or DSP so you target the ID without handing over the email.