HOW DOES IT WORK?

 

Facebook is far less complicated than Google. Ad service and recommendations made by Facebook are done using simple keyword analysis and a record of your IP address. When you sign up, Facebook gives you a series of boxes to fill in, each of which is simply a collection of keywords. What television shows do you like? What are your favorite books? Are you single? Married? Do you have pets? How old are you?

All of this information is volunteered willingly by members. Your friends have already supplied their e-mail addresses (and access to their e-mail address books), the names of their high schools and colleges and workplaces. Using just your IP address, your e-mail address, and your name, it can instantly offer a pretty solid guess about who your friends might be. Provide it with more information, and Facebook can offer you hundreds of people you probably already know.

As Facebook learns more about you, it will continue to recommend folks who might be (or might once have been) your friends. Through the ever-growing complexity of this network, the site learns more and more about you. Who do you invite to your events? Who do you exchange pokes and messages with? Who do you date?

Since advertising was first invented, marketing professionals have been trying to find ways to weasel this level of detailed personal information out of people. Until Facebook, it never occurred to anyone to simply give everyone in the world a form to fill out—a form that could freely be cross-referenced with their peer group. Facebook represents the most valuable repository of psychographic, demographic, and behavioral data on the planet.

You’re not the only person who provides Facebook with information about you. Facebook’s advertising partners provide conversion information—if you click on an ad and navigate the advertiser’s site for a while, that company could be giving Facebook detailed information about your activities on its site. According to their privacy policy, Facebook keeps that information for up to six months.

Remember how Farmville and Mafia Wars took over your newsfeed before you figured out you could block the application from showing up and annoying you? Remember how you seriously thought about deleting your Facebook page because those games were either more annoying than a fart in an elevator (if you didn’t play them) or so addictive that college began to seem like an unnecessary distraction (if you did)? Those games aren’t owned or run by Facebook, but they can see your profile just like your friends can, and they propagate like a pyramid scheme. You get those invites to help your friend find a pot of gold or whack some generic videogame Italian because your friend gets points for recruiting you.