Facebook is seemingly built on two concepts, lately. The first is that privacy is for losers. The second is that brands deserve everything Facebook can offer them to prop up their stock price. So, ready to have your airline “reach out” to you after you gripe about a flight on your wall?
Social media monitoring is nothing new, of course. Companies have been sitting on Twitter, looking for themselves and attempting to address problems and/or troll for a while now. It’s pretty standard procedure. Facebook, however, wants to add in that extra touch of privacy invasion, according to CNET:
For companies that produce entertainment content or that have brands to promote, the conversations people have about them on Facebook are invisible, said business development vice president Chris Daniels said at the LeWeb conference here. Now the company is working to give brands and media companies a better way find those conversations so they can engage.
“We know people are talking about TV, movies, and media on Facebook. We know it’s happening on Facebook more than anywhere else. We just need to surface that more,” Daniels said.
By “surfacing”, Daniels means “Showing companies you’re talking about them, even if you have your profile set to private.” It’s not clear what this tool would do, but Daniels seems to be indicating that companies could read posts and comments about themselves, and possibly even reply to them. You know, because after talking smack about the opposing team all day, you want them to show up in your Feed to make fun of you.
We feel like a broken record bringing this up, but does nobody at Facebook take a moment to ask themselves about the possibilities of abuse, here? Giving corporations the ability to observe private communications with, likely, little supervision from Facebook is inevitably setting the company and its users up for problems, potentially serious ones. Say for example, you gripe about Delta. Delta makes a note of that, and suddenly you’re on the ass-end of every delay and bump the company can muster. We live in a world where a fast food company executive will use his daughter’s email to troll unions
Hopefully, this only has to go spectacularly wrong the once, and Facebook will realize the issue. Hopefully.