Shiv Singh is the head of digital marketing for Pepsi’s beverage line-up. At a recent “Social Media Week” event, he discussed how brands should increase efforts to “listen” to social media conversations. Mr. Singh said that:
“Twenty-five percent of all time spent online is spent on Facebook. We only get to see and listen to a small slice of that. That [larger slice] is the missing link. We sometimes overstate the benefits of listening and we don’t acknowledge the fact that we’re not listening to everything as a whole. Mark Zuckerberg and his team at Facebook are brilliant, but if there’s one thing that keeps him awake at night it’s that the default state for profiles is not public.â€
No doubt, if privacy advocates and responsible policymakers–and concerned Facebook users–hadn’t objected, the profiles would be public by default. Given that Facebook’s ad revenues are connected to having such a goldmine of data free to its partners, having profiles be public by default would give us privacy nightmares.
