Online Social Networks and E-Commerce - MIT Computer Science ...

Clarence Lee and Shirley Fung
products to their friends in the network. These endorsements can help build brand loyalty and reach out
to those who are more inclined to listen to recommendations and reviews from their social network.
MySpace has exploited profile data to create micro-segments for companies to focus their marketing
communications to, and a similar service is provided by Facebook Ads. Besides advertisements,
companies such as Apple or motion pictures such as Pirates of the Caribbean have corporate profile sites
and networks on these large social networking sites. These sites help promote for new products or spread
the word for promotions. Upcoming motion pictures use these profile sites to provide trailers and local
movie times. These company profiles also provide a portal for them to hear reviews directly from their
customers.
Google introduced OpenSocial in November 2007 as an attempt to standardize the APIs for many
different social networking Web sites. By making it easier for developers to create applications for a large
number of social networking Web sites, one can only expect that these cross-site applications will
continue to grow in numbers.
Privacy Protection on Data Collected by Amazon and Facebook
Current trends are that these businesses are going to provide more and more services that consumers will
participate in. Consumers get the benefits of convenience and fun from these services, and businesses will
continue to use this data for commerce purposes. There will be a lot of data mining done on all this data,
and consumers needs to be aware of the fact that all of this data can be very sensitive information that
they may not have adequate privacy protection for.
Data Collected by Facebook
We will now examine the type of information that is possible to be stored on a Facebook profile. In
addition, we will also discuss the types of privacy issues that can arise from sharing these types of
information. We have attempted to speak with a representative from Facebook, but they had declined to
schedule an interview at this time.
Profile
On Facebook, users can voluntary fill in information about themselves. Facebook profile information is
publically searchable using online search engines, and the user can choose privacy levels on fields in the
“contact” portion. The entire Facebook profile also has privacy level settings.
Page 10