• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, June 13, 2019

So it turns out that early on, the Zuck was aware of privacy concerns and now has Facebook hustling to settle with the Federal Trade Commission before this becomes a factor in the agency’s investigation of whether the social platform violated a 2012 consent decree in which Facebook agreed to better protect user privacy.

That this is even a news story is something of a surprise -- since if you've ever been around entrepreneurs, you know they know EVERYTHING that happens at their company. Especially if it has to do with revenue. 

Now, you might argue that's true for the first few years -- but that by 2012, Facebook was already a monster and it was not possible for the Zuck to know everything.

And you would be wrong. The cornerstone of Facebook’s massive ad revenue is its purported ability to target users in highly specialized audience segments. You can only do this if you collect a massive amount of their data, which of course we know Facebook does.  

Facebook, Google and Amazon are unique in that users cannot WAIT to reveal more about themselves each time they go on the sites. It doesn’t take long before algorithms can fill in the blanks of what you don’t outright tell them with your keystrokes, and they know as much about you as your parents or your significant other -- perhaps even more. 

If you have spent even five minutes in the digital ad space, you know there’s no such thing as online privacy, and the reason all those privacy “guarantees” are so long is, it takes a lot of words to hide the notion that data about you will not only be collected, it will likely be sold to others and reused over and over again.  Just hit AGREE and get back to your life.

While a highly vocal minority of people object to the amount of data being collected about them and how it is thereafter used, most folks simply don’t care enough to alter their use of the internet.  That anyone is “shocked” that the head guy at perhaps the biggest collector of personal data in history knew all about it from the getgo, is shocking unto itself.

FANG has deployed its operatives in DC to argue that limiting -- or better yet, eliminating --  the collection of user data will stifle “innovation and competition.” Which is BS, of course. But it would have a significant impact on the sale of targeted advertising (most of which doesn’t work very well anyway). In fact, it would greatly help the rest of the internet if the FTC would eliminate digital personal-data-based targeting and force everyone back to contextual placement. 

Then those who have built valuable audiences like, say, newspapers, could get a fair price for their ads rather than having agencies find the same folks somewhere in the exchange-enabled (and much cheaper) long tail. 

Yes, some will argue it’s wasteful to buy audiences that do not fit into specifically tailored (notice, I didn’t use the word curated, which badly needs to be retired) segments, but that is not the end of the world. TV does that all the time, and it still moves enough product to make the spend worthwhile, proving that sometimes your prospects are JUST beyond what you think is your normal customer profile.

Yes, Zuck knew all along. They all did. We all did. 

Except maybe Congress.