Bad Petition, Bad! Part 2

This is a response to Colin's post on the class' mother blog.

Wait, if my Facebook messages become public, does that mean Scarlett Johansson could find out that I'm cheating on her with Megan Fox!?!  


Probably not.  


This Facebook staff post for application developers does seem troubling to me: "Message: This table allows you to get information about each message in a thread. You can get information about who wrote the message, the content of the message and also information about the attachment to the message, if it exists, in the same format as attachments are returned in the stream." The "content of the message" part especially bothers me. The way I use Facebook, I treat the Messages feature like e-mail, and I assume it is (mostly, barring hacking) private. Judging by the people who are my friends, it seems like most Facebook users are taking quizzes, sending imaginary items to each other, and playing games involving farm animals and the Mafia, and allowing more applications access to their profiles each time. I don't think they realize taking that quiz gives an outside organization this access. As the Pew report pointed out, traditional advertising is not paying the bills online for content providers.  

Sites like Facebook are the new laboratory for "revenue models." To make money, they must sell something to somebody, and if the users pay nothing, then selling the users' personal data to the highest bidder is one possibility.

Online users need to be aware of who the customer is for media companies. In the old media, the customers being served are both the advertiser buying access to the audience, and the audience buying the newspaper, or cable TV or whatever. In the old model, most of the audience has a pretty good idea of this advertiser relationship. In the online media, things are changing quickly, and I suspect most people are unaware of what the new money-making relationship is, or how they fit into it. Or that they, the users, are being farmed for demographic data.

So maybe the new media's economic model is based on the machines' use of humans as a power source in The Matrix.