Your personality in ads

You may have noticed at some point or another that Facebook advertisements eerily pertain to your life at times.

If you've indicated that you are single on your profile, Facebook will show you advertisements from dating sites or services to either help you or constantly remind you of your single status. If you recently "liked" a Fan Page about "Zoolander," you might start seeing advertisements telling you about a neat site where to buy "Zoolander" tee shirts.

If you indicated in your "Activities" that you play an instrument, you might see advertisements on where you can buy an instrument or products for it. Advertisements about specific businesses located in your hometown or college town may be present as well.

These personalized advertisements are not too much of a surprise for most Facebook users. Facebook has been tailoring what advertisements you see based on information on your profile and other actions you take on the site, such as "liking" a page, for a while now.

However, a new development Facebook has recently launched is slightly troubling because the information it gathers and shares about you extends to other sites.

Facebook's new programs, Open Graph and the Instant Personalization Pilot Program, primarily allows select partners to instantly personalize features on their websites based on information you provide on your Facebook profile.

These select websites may also have the Facebook "like" button embedded on their websites that, when clicked, will notify Facebook about it and will show up on your newsfeed. Acting as a "social action," Facebook will then note that preference and use it to create more targeted advertisements.

Facebook states that the new features will make Web browsing more personal, but is that what we really want? It's creepy and strange that Facebook seems to have a goal to attain as much information about us as possible in order to create more targeted advertisements.

However, users do have the option to participate in the new features or not. However, all users are automatically "opted in" at first.

I did find a way to "opt out" of the new feature by scouring the confusing privacy settings. By checking a box in "Privacy Settings," I  assumed that the major new feature would be disabled, but it seemed too easy.

This new feature is raising some eyebrows, but Facebook assures users that the participating websites are contractually required to respect people's privacy preferences and only use public Facebook information. This is good, but I noticed that it also says that if a website wants to acquire non-public information, it can go ahead and ask your permission to allow it.

That's not the part that bothered me though. Facebook also states that websites can ask your friend's permission to pull non-public information about people on their friend list.

Additionally, I was right to be wary about the deceitfully simple "opt out" button because even if you opt out, your friends may still share information about you whether you use the feature or not. While you might say "no" to sharing non-public information with websites, there is a chance that one of your friends could agree to provide that information.

Is Facebook taking the first step toward tracking everything we do inside and out of its website?  What was once a seemingly harmless "like" button appears to be rapidly turning into a way to track our every move on the Internet in a quick and concise way.

This method of gathering what the public likes is especially useful to marketers, but personally, I don't want businesses to have a plethora of information about me.
 

Alyssa Mueller ‘13 (muelleaa@stolaf.edu) is from Rochester, Minn. Her major is currently undecided.