Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/12/20/guilt-by-association.html
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I have a Facebook page for my business, and my customers often communicate with me through private messages to that page. My concern was that if Facebook was sharing those communications with fourth-parties, I might accidentally be in breach of my own privacy policies.
Great news, everyone! I should now also be concerned that Amazon is mining my communications with my customers to target advertising at them, potentially drawing their business away from my company.
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Facebook users will never learn
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When a company can’t pointedly deny that they are doing something, you know they are doing it.
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You really need to find something else. Face it, Facebook is toxic. And always will be. In fact, advertising the fact that you are NOT on Facebook would be good advertising.
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Well yes, but
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If you’re making an assurance that you’re relying on Facebook making good on… that’s not a safe assurance.
The problem of building your business on a platform when you are the thing being sold by that platform, I guess.
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@beep54orama and @Shuck, stop, you’re both right! It’s more like we built our business, then added a Facebook component to see how successful it is as a marketing tool. It’s not great. I would delete it now, but I have two reservations:
- I haven’t explored what that would mean for our Instagram marketing (which is profitable even on a tiny scale), since the two accounts are so closely linked.
- We are concerned about someone creating an impostor account. That’s 50% of Facebook’s value proposition for businesses.
Happily, these are things I can just figure out and then move forward.
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If I remember correctly, Facebook has actively encouraged businesses to do that too, no? One of the (many) evil things about Facebook, given that they were essentially selling you out.
Yeah, that’s one of the problems with the “delete Facebook”/“Don’t be on Facebook” response; it’s impossible to not be on a social media platform, as a business, when it gets to be sufficiently popular enough. So then begins trying to grapple with the complex problem of “how do I be on it while minimizing how much I’m on it (and the harm from being on it).” Which it sounds like you’re on the way to solving. (Hell, it’s a problem I grapple with even as a non-user of Facebook, given that they’re still collecting my data without my even having an account.)
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One needn’t look any further than the evolution of BoingBoing’s infrastructure over the years to see how even some of the most ardent defenders of web privacy struggle with the issue of having high ideals but also dealing with the way their own business works on the web and social media. Abandoning certain sales and social media platforms just isn’t fiscally practical for many businesses and individuals.
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