Your Whole Life Will Soon Be Public

Within our individual lives there is currently a division between the activities we do online and the activities we do when we aren't connected. Just as online privacy is beginning to fade away we will soon witness the destruction of offline privacy. Last night I was speaking with a friend of mine from Webster Hall in New York City when an idea clicked. If all of your general activities at an event could be tracked back through Facebook (or alternative social media services), there would be a huge advertising potential. Imagine reading your Facebook News Feed and seeing a story that says "Nick and 3 of your friends just entered the Smirnoff Vodka booth at the Everclear concert." With the power of Facebook connect and competing services, we will soon see these types of activities become public. Rather than just accepting a terms of service and privacy policy when you register for a site, you will begin to do the same thing when you register for events. How will this work? Through leveraging readily accessible technologies you can track the locations of people attending an event. This means that ads being displayed to them can be targeted and it also means you will soon be able to target those ads toward their friends. Some of these concepts begin to sound like those out of recent science fiction movies. Malls for instance will soon become entire branded experiences. The moment you enter a store, your friends on Facebook and other social platforms will immediately see that you've entered. There are clear privacy issues with these forms of broadcast advertising. There are also questionable business practices at hand. Should individuals be paid for this new form of referral-based advertising? Also, shouldn't the consumer be able to opt-in to the public display of this information? The concept of the "social web" eventually begins to fade away as all of our offline and online activities become merged. We are only months into the launching of Facebook Connect, MySpace Data Availability and Google Friend Connect. The recent "Congressional scrutiny over the intrusiveness of online advertising and behavioral targeting" that Erick Schonfeld points out will become increasingly important as the technologies transform advertising. So when has advertising gone to far? While many of those focused on monetizing the "social web" are willing to try anything to increase ad revenue, consumer interests may become a secondary concern. Is there a line to be drawn when it comes to new advertising techniques? Will Congress be able to stop many of these activities prior to a multi-billion dollar industry being built around this?

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Your Whole Life Will Soon Be Public

Nick O'Neill

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Nick O'Neill