Meet “Facebook Living Room” and “Facebook Town Square”

Facebook and Google have grown without any real constraints, and their core business model is provide carrots— free on-line services — but where they write T&Cs which allow them to do basically anything they want with your data. They have tried lots of different business models for this, but they come back to the only one that really works … pushing customised advertisements to you.

And so there are a whole lot of marketing and advertising agencies sitting behind most of the things you do on-line, and quickly determining if they want you to be their next customer, and finding a hook. At the extreme end of the spectrum it can be used to push targeted political messages based on people’s interests, and at the other end, it is good old targeted advertisements. And the cloud service provider companies now want to know if that advert your clicked on, actually did lead to a sale (as the commission is often higher).

Google and Facebook thus both broke the isolated model of the Web a long time ago, and where your activity in one browser, will stimulate something in another browser. For this their perfect model is one-to-one marketing, and then to know you have followed up on an advertisement. But there’s a general kick-back against this approach, from both the EU (with GDPR) and from citizens. Consent, privacy and the control of the…