The Facebook Data Scandal and HOW It Affects Your Business!

If you’re promoting your business online then we are willing to bet Facebook is a pretty big part of your overall strategy.

For us it certainly is. Facebook has over a billion active daily users and an incredibly effective system for advertising to all of them.

It’s simple and effective, and easily accessible for anyone with Internet.

Their platform has user data carefully organized so that an advertiser can choose the right niche for their product.

Here’s an Example:

If you’re selling Dog Training Program in Texas, for example, you would select “Dogs” as a user interest and “Texas” as user location. Within hours those ads could be showing.

At no time does Facebook give out email addresses, phone numbers or names of its users. It simply categorizes basic data (location, gender, groups, relationship status) so that advertisers can very easily place their ads.

Facebook is free to the public and selling ad space is how it makes a profit. Facebook uses our data to give us the most relevant ads possible – which we personally have no problem with.

But is all that about to change?

That’s the big question right now with everything gong on with the whole Cambridge Analytica Scandal.

Well, here’s what we think… the Internet, while not exactly new territory, is full of constantly evolving and growing mediums – mediums like Facebook, like YouTube, like the Google search engine.

What started life as a kind of social experiment has now become a part of people’s daily lives. And while lawmakers are insistent on regulating many things about the Internet and what we access or provide on it, we don’t think the days of ad-placement technology are at risk.

Here are a FEW Reasons Why:

The Facebook company hasn’t broken any privacy laws
The principles used by Facebook to organize user data are used by just about every other big companies, Google included.
The problem is actually not as big and scary as the public thinks it is

There are NO Privacy Laws in place right now that regulate exactly how an internet company can obtain and use data from its users or customers.

There’s bound to be some in the future, but unless Advertising itself becomes illegal, marketers will always have access to some information about their potential clients – that’s just how marketing works.

Far before the Digital Age, it worked this way. If an auto parts dealer wanted to place an ad in a magazine, he or she would choose a car magazine rather than a health magazine. It’s that simple.

Digital Data is used the same way.

Facebook is being targeted right now by watchdogs because it recently realized the data of many users was illicitly collected and used by a third-party. The methods used to originally collect that data, however, were totally innocent.

When you made/or make an account on Facebook, we are willfully giving the application our name, photos, and our status updates. It’s the same with any online application you use.

Facebook itself didn’t steal the data. However, a Icleverly-disguised application within Facebook, called “This is Your Digital Life,” did.

In Mark Zuckerberg’s own words, “We didn’t take a broad enough view on what our responsibility was and that was a huge mistake. That was my mistake.”

Facebook stock prices did dip a bit this last few weeks, but they are already on the way back up less than a day after Facebook CEO appeared before U.S. Congress. Maybe that’s because people are making more of an effort to understand how the problem happened. Also whether this loss of data is actually dangerous.

In our opinion, having your name and a few photos stolen is weird, but hardly life-threatening. This isn’t identity theft. No one has your credit card details because you have a Facebook account – unless you put that on your profile.

And why on Earth would you do that?

Facebook Ads are still running strong and, in all likelihood, will continue to do so for a long time. If that’s not the case, I will evolve my marketing strategies for the new era. That’s how a successful business is run – you just adapt with the changes roll with the punches.

Talk Soon,

Nicky & Dave