Last night’s mashup event, which looked at the Facebook / privacy debate, and how Facebook’s new “Like” functionality plays into that debate, proved both lively and thought provoking.

There was no chance of a consensus emerging amongst participants, illustrating how divided people are on this complicated issue.  It did prompt me to draw a number of conclusions:

• The key question is not where along the private – public continuum most people are likely to situate themselves.  It is what value they place on different bits of their privacy, and how much value they need in exchange for giving that privacy up
• At the moment, Facebook faces a “perfect privacy storm”:
  1. Users who previously expected their data to be kept behind a walled garden are uncomfortable finding out that that might no longer be the case. (Versus Twitter, where users from the joined expecting everything they Tweeted to be public.)
  2. Users do not understand what data Facebook collects about them and how this is used to generate value. Their privacy concerns are therefore derived from both a lack of transparency and control.
  3. Facebook is not in a position to educate users on how data will be used, because frankly, they’re still working out how to drive value from that data.
  4. Users don’t see any value for themselves in sharing their data. There is therefore very little to persuade them to give up any privacy. (This would change if Facebook found a way to drive value from that data that benefited themselves, their advertisers and their users at the same time.)
• There are some parallels with the privacy debate around behavioural targeting. Once again, there is a perfect storm where
  1. Users don’t understand what is being done with their data,
  2. have no visibility on what happens to their data,
  3. have no control over what happens to their data and
  4. don’t see any benefit in sharing that data so have little incentize to give up any of their privacy.
• However there is one key difference between the Facebook privacy debate and the debate around privacy and behavioural targeting. Namely, that the information Facebook has, although deeply personal, is broadly accepted as data which the users have voluntarily submitted to Facebook. This makes Facebook somewhat different to the behavioural targeting companies, who in many cases have been collecting data on users that they may not even be aware exists, and have not in any direct sense created.
• At the end of the day, Facebook is a multi-sided platform that has to work out a value proposition that works for it, its users and its advertisers.  The privacy storm suggests that it is out of kilter with its users – and I wonder whether advertisers view this with excitement or trepidation…