It took only minutes after Facebook’s announcement of its new “Dating” software for the warnings to begin.
“Don’t trust Facebook with your love life,” said the New York Times. “Please enjoy Facebook Dating!” sarcastically noted the Washington Post, which added, “You have kept nothing from us at Facebook.”
“Use it if you dare,” said Esquire. And 9to5Mac pointed out “concerns” have been raised.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation explained that with Facebook’s “track record of mishandling user data, and its business model of monetizing our sensitive information to power third-party targeted advertising, potential users should view Facebook’s desire to peek into our bedrooms as a huge red flag.”
It pointed out that just this week, Facebook was faced with the discovery on an unprotected server of “a huge database of phone numbers.”
“Generally, this is how the story goes: sensitive user data is leaked or found to be available in a way that Facebook users didn’t expect. But don’t worry, the company says – we’ve updated those practices. While improvements are appreciated, this cycle gets repeated so regularly that you could almost set your watch by it.”
EFF explained that while Facebook began as a proposition “to make it easier for friends, or acquaintances, to connect and share info about themselves with one another,” it’s changed vastly.
After numerous scandals, EFF said, “many users have spent the last year or two trying to minimize the information they intentionally give to the company (though its ubiquity can make that difficult).”
“Facebook Dating offers a new twist on what the company once promised – connection – in exchange for what the company values most – your data.
“At this point, one would have to be pretty desperate to give a company with Facebook’s history any insight into their romantic life. Your friend list alone can reveal all sorts of information about you. With a new service like Dating that gives Facebook access to particularly sensitive information about our love lives – like which of our friends we have a crush on, what we are looking for in a partner, where we met them, etc. – users should be very wary that the company will continue to mishandle this especially private info the way it has already mishandled user info for years.”
EFF warned that while Facebook says it currently isn’t monetizing Dating, it is “powered by advertising dollars, paid for by advertisers who want access to the data that Facebook collects.”
The bottom line?
“In all likelihood, dating profile data will prove too valuable an addition to that collection for the company to keep hidden from advertisers, who would love to be the third wheel in your relationship with Facebook’s dating service. Some of that info will almost certainly be available for those third parties to use in their search for ever more detailed data about potential targets.”
