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Chronicles

The story behind the story

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Privacy, please

Some campaigners worry about using social sites such as Facebook  —  Regular columnist Bill Thompson wonders if it is time to create web services that can be trusted.  —  Like most journalists I know I'm very sloppy about keeping my online communications secure.

BBC

Context & Ripple Effects

Bill Thompson's column lands days after Facebook's most aggressive commercial week yet: Mark Zuckerberg's $240 million Microsoft investment at a $15 billion valuation was confirmed on November 15, and on November 12 the company announced Fan pages tied to its new advertising platform. The money and the ad machine both depend on the same asset — user data — which is exactly what the campaigners cited in this piece say they no longer trust.

The timing sharpens the argument. Unconfirmed reports have Facebook raising another $500 million and circling China's Zhanzuo.com, while observers predict it will eat LinkedIn's lunch in business networking — expansion plans that all presume continued user goodwill about how personal information is used.

First-order effects

  • Facebook's Fan pages and advertising platform now face their first organized scrutiny: campaigners questioning social-site privacy put the company's monetization roadmap in tension with the trust its growth depends on.
  • Thompson's call for 'web services that can be trusted' gives the campaigner critique a constructive framing — a market opening rather than just an objection.

Second-order effects

  • If trust becomes a selling point, rival social networks and service providers can differentiate on data handling rather than features, forcing Facebook to defend its ad-platform choices publicly instead of shipping them quietly.
  • Vendors of security and privacy tooling gain a mainstream audience: sloppy default habits among even professional users, as Thompson admits of himself, create demand for services that handle protection on the user's behalf.

Third-order effects

  • If the pattern holds, trusted handling of personal data moves from an engineering afterthought to a competitive requirement — pointing toward independent custodians or audited intermediaries standing between users and platforms.
  • Sustained campaigner pressure around social-network data use makes formal regulation more likely as the industry scales faster than its own safeguards.

The trend: Social networks are monetizing personal data faster than they earn permission for it, making verifiable trust a coming axis of competition in web services.