Good ideas deserve to be found & so does the consumer’s trust
A few days ago, I went on Instagram and received a pop up message asking if I would allow them to track my activity across their various apps. I did not think much of it, and accepted as they promised better content and more targeted advertising. A few minutes later, I opened the Facebook app and received the same message.
I got curious if this had something to do with the controversies Facebook has been embroiled in regarding its user’s data privacy and security. Apple has been protecting the privacy of its customers by limiting the amount of data that apps can collect by giving more control to the users. The users will now have the ability to turn off being tracked across apps and location tracking.
This makes the users feel more secure and in control of their privacy and data. This would significantly affect Facebook’s profits as ad revenue would go down since Apple in its past few updates has increased its user’s privacy protection policies making it more difficult for Facebook to track data and personalise advertising.
To defend personalized advertising Facebook launched an ad campaign called “Good ideas deserve to be found”. In my opinion, Facebook should have been more transparent with the public, especially since transparency is integral to a consumer’s trust and faith in the social media network.
What Facebook should have done was spread awareness about the significant improvement in a user’s experience by enabling access to data across platforms. Instead the campaign talked about how small businesses can get noticed and profit out of this. Given how badly small business have been affected by the pandemic, I think this did not sit well with the public who made their opinion felt as the campaign video uploaded on their verified YouTube channel got 99% dislikes and has the comments disabled.
Personally, I have never had a problem with apps and social networks using my data to improve my experience. However, I do appreciate the ability to choose and opt out of this tracking if one desires.
