Facebook ID - Marketers' Holy Grail
At bare minimum, your ID provides access to your name and profile photo, no matter what privacy settings you have. Those who stick with Facebook's recommended settings will reveal even more: their location, hometown, list of friends, lots of photos, and many of their "likes," such as activities and interests.
That's a goldmine for companies that are trying to target their products to you.
"Once you have an ID you can look up the person," said Axel Schultze, CEO of Xeesm, a social media marketing software developer. That gives you access to all the information publicly available in their profile, and from that, "you can build correlations between all sorts of other data."
Robin Dindayal, director of product management at social marketing software company Awareness Inc., ran an experiment and plugged a Facebook ID into Facebook's Graph API. That's a tool Facebook makes available for programmers who want to connect to the site's platform.
The API returned a smattering of information about the user, including the gender and geographic settings. A person -- or a machine -- can retrieve that data after starting with nothing more than the e-mail address.
"Combine this with an e-mail address and I can add you to a mailing list," Dindayal said. "Beyond that, some users within Facebook don't have their privacy settings set very high and even more information might be made available."
Facebook has technical safeguards in place intended to prevent data miners with massive lists of e-mail addresses from sucking in troves of public information about Facebook's users. But invaders keep slippingthrough the site's defenses.
Right now, your Facebook user ID is mostly valuable to direct marketers and political campaigns, but insurance companies and prospective employers are starting to take interest too. Privacy experts say the market for your information will keep expanding.
Facebook's in an unenviable position: Its entire reason for being is to encourage members to connect and broadcast personal information. The more you share, the stronger Facebook's business model becomes. But the site is also trying to balance that against a pledge to respect its members' privacy preferences.
"Facebook is committed to providing users a safe and secure experience, and we work aggressively to develop technical and human solutions to keep people in control of their information," Facebook spokesman Swain said.
Facebook has a history of shooting itself in the foot, though, when it comes to dealing with privacy concerns.
After the Rapleaf firestorm -- which included the revelation that some Facebook application developers were selling user IDs to data aggregators -- Facebook announced that it had a solution: It would ban all applications from sharing user IDs with outside parties.
Developers freaked out, and leapt on an obvious flaw in that plan: For-profit applications often use third-party virtual currency companies like Tapjoy (formerly Offerpal) monetize their apps. So Facebook went back to the drawing board, and is working to finalize a new technical policy that will keep information from data brokers but allow developers to work with advertisers and payment companies. The new rules are slated to take effect Jan. 1.
That doesn't solve the bigger problem: Facebook is sitting on a massively valuable data stash of information that users make available publicly, and keeping it away from commercially motivated data harvesters is an arms race.
"The genie is out of the bottle," Dindayal said. "Once the information is out, it's impossible to know who has a copy of it."
