An emailed sales pitch from a sales rep from Quattro (a mobile ad network recently purchased by Apple) obtained by TechCrunch refers to a “new program launching this month called ViP (Verification of iTunes Purchase)”. The programs ties iPhone and iPad ads in apps directly to your purchasing data from iTunes where than can learn, among other things, the conversion rate of ad impressions to downloads via a “proprietary direct link from the ad to App Store”.

Using personal data to refine how ads are delivered is not new, and right now iAds VIP is designed to help developers sell more apps. But any ad program that offers “a proprietary direct link” direct to your iTune’s purchase data has huge implications for both fans and music marketers.

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Editor & Publisher and the Huffington Post are both talking about the updates. Interestingly enough, I heard about it from @michacha101 who is one of those people that I have no idea why I follow on Twitter but have gained value from doing so. Having said that (and given them a plug) I am learning more about the openness of the social media environment and the value that can be taken from it. Journalists drool over this kind of exposure and availability of information. Trouble is that for the sake of ‘objectivity’ or ‘political correctness or whatever there will always be rules and regs that restrict just how effective the medium can be.

The Huffington Post tells us that some of the LA Times policies include

Integrity is our most important commodity: Avoid writing or posting anything that would embarrass The Times or compromise your ability to do your job.
Assume that your professional life and your personal life will merge online regardless of your care in separating them.

Even if you use privacy tools (determining who can view your page or profile, for instance), assume that everything you write, exchange or receive on a social media site is public.

Just as political bumper stickers and lawn signs are to be avoided in the offline world, so too are partisan expressions online.

There’s a lot of detail that I am leaving out here and here’s why. I have to give the LA Times credit for being on the ball. You see the Huffington Post had only one comment but it was from Andrew Nystrom / L.A. Times social media guy / @AdNys who was completely transparent by saying:

Thank you for writing about our new Guidelines. For the record, here are links to:

- The full text of our revised Social Media Guidelines: http://latimes.com/socialmedia — our original Guidelines were issued in March 2009, before the WaPo or WSJ (and most other major media outlets) issued theirs.

- Our directory of 200+ L.A. Times(@lat¬imes)-rela¬ted Twitter accounts: http://latimes.com/twitter

- The full text of our 2007 Ethics Guidelines (currently under revision): http://latimes.com/ethics

Hope this is helpful. I welcome all feedback.

Nice move.

So let’s recap. As a result of the social media ‘world’ I got data from someone that was of interest, that was about information that can be seen both positively and negatively depending on your point of view but was ultimately made completely transparent by the source which ultimately reflects positively on them. Pretty cool.

So if you really think that people care about where you are walking and what you see it’s likely that you are just really enamored with yourself. What people really want is information that helps. Thanks to everyone who helped here.

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But this time, Facebook is finally saving someone’s bacon. Or, oddly enough, his pancakes. As the New York Times says,

The message on Rodney Bradford’s Facebook page, posted at 11:49 a.m. on Oct. 17, asked where his pancakes were. The words were typed from a computer in his father’s apartment in Harlem.

At the time, the sentence, written in street slang, was just another navel-gazing, cryptic Facebook status update — meaningless to anyone besides Mr. Bradford. But when Mr. Bradford, 19, was arrested the next day as a suspect in a robbery at the Farragut Houses in Brooklyn, where he lives, the words took on greater importance. They became his alibi.

One minute after his status update, someone in Brooklyn was mugged. The article isn’t exactly clear on how Bradford was named as a suspect in the mugging, but he was arrested for the crime, even though his father and step-mother both said he was with them in Harlem (and Harlem != Brooklyn, if you’re not familiar with NYC).

When Bradford’s lawyer told the Brooklyn DA about the status update, the DA’s office subpoenaed Facebook’s records to verify that he wasn’t at the scene of the crime. The IP address resolved to Bradford’s father’s home—and the charges against Bradford were dropped.

The ADA realizes that anyone with his username and password could have posted the status update, but, as Bradford’s lawyer says, “This implies a level of criminal genius that you would not expect from a young boy like this; he is not Dr. Evil.”

So it just goes to show: maybe all those pointless status updates aren’t so pointless after all.

What do you think? Can status updates (with IP records) be taken as legal alibis?

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The regulations seem to address the issue of disclosure: if I give you a copy of my book and you write about it, you have to let your readers know that. If I buy you dinner and then you write about my book or reference my site, you have to disclose that. And so on, and so on.

Problem is, this FTC guideline has gotten more and more onerous in the echo chamber of the blogosphere, and bloggers are getting a bit paranoid about the implications.

Luckily, it appears that this paranoia is misplaced, so you can all take a deep breath. Earlier this week – Oct 14th, 2009 – Mary Engle, associate director for advertising practices at the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, had a conference call with reporters to clarify the situation and here’s what she said:

“We’re not going to be patrolling the blogosphere, we are not planning on investigating individual bloggers.”

Engle emphasized that what they’ve released are new guidelines. “They aren’t rules and regulations, and they don’t have the force of law. They are guidelines intended to help advertisers comply with Section 5 of the FTC Act [PDF]” which focuses on unfair or deceptive practices.

So it’s not the rebirth of the Blog Police as the Disclosure Police, as I tweeted earlier while listening to a panel on this subject here at Blogworld, but it is nonetheless a reminder that you should still be transparent anyway. If a vendor pays $200 to write about their product, don’t run away in terror, just let your readers know.

And that’s what this brouhaha is all about anyway: just be transparent and disclose what’s going on, and you’ll be in the clear from both the FTC and ethically on the right side of things too.

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Much like buggy whips, assembly before the assembly line, the introduction of the steel belted radial tire, we have allowed companies to fail. This sudden and disturbing interest in bailing out companies so that they can continue on with their old business models that do not fit where technology and society is going is going to fry innovation in its tracks. Sorry, while I like the New York Times and the Seattle Times, it was not a big loss to me to lose the Seattle PI, the Rocky Mountain News or other newspapers that have shutdown or gone out of business.

This is not an assault on Journalists, this is not an assault on the free press, we need a reasoned non yellow journalism (AKA Fox News) way of getting the news. What is happening is that we are getting the news from people we trust, not necessarily the NY Times. We are following what our friends follow, we are reading blogs, we are reading the BBC, and we are reading a whole host of online content. While the ads on the internet and on those content sites might not be generating mega bucks in profits, they are reporting the news. If anything shows that the current way news is developed, promulgated, and shared is broken, look at what happened during the Green Revolution in Iran. Most people got their news from Twitter. If you want breaking news you will go to twitter, not to CNN and not to Fox, ABC, CBS, or NBC.

If you want to find news information you will go right to AP (even if you disagree with their policies) because the AP has a web site. Or you will go to Yahoo news, Google News, or MSNBC. People go to the middle man, not necessarily to the core web sites that create that content. Bloggers have had to deal with this for years; it is time for newspapers to learn the same.

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) has introduced S. 673, the so-called “Newspaper Revitalization Act,” that would give outlets tax deals if they were to restructure as 501(c)(3) corporations. That bill has so far attracted one cosponsor, Cardin’s Maryland colleague Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D). White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs had played down the possibility of government assistance for news organizations, which have been hit by an economic downturn and dwindling ad revenue. Source: The Hill

While later on in the article they do talk about the core ideas behind why this needs to happen. One of those ideas is that blogs are unreliable. When people are reading blogs like 538, or other authoritative blogs then the argument does not hold true. Blogs are not the boogey man to scare small children with, there are blogs that go back and fact check everything like Ars Techica. We do have blogs that spin the news to suit them, but this is no different than what we see in media today, information as entertainment is nothing new. The problem is that with all the choices we have to divert our attention, newspapers are but a small section of where we will spend our money on entertainment.

News is hardly news anymore, and buggy whips are a dying business. We didn’t prop up the buggy whip industry, and news is all over the internet. Some of the sponsored big box news is absolute tripe, with a large amount of demagoguery on both sides of the political fence. No one complains when average people get sucked into something that is not fact checked when it comes from big box news. The same holds true for blogs and other social media, if you look at what makes it to the top of social media and blogs; it is all from great sources with trustworthy people, at least as trustworthy as anyone else who purports to be a reporter. Newspapers do not need a tax bail out; they need to learn to work in the new environment.

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If the domain name aptly represents the industry or niche it does business in, it can get direct traffic where users type it into the address bar and reach the site. It also represents your company in cyberspace and is the first port of call online.

There are two tricky issue involved in the buying of domains. The first is that you cannot use comparable sales figures (as in the case of real estate). The second is the intrinsic value of the domain name itself (as in the case of vehicle, jewellery etc). These are intangibles and cannot be used as bargaining chips at the negotiating table.

This post is based on an interesting writeup by James Siminoff, webpreneur and owner of phonetag.com and grid.com. James spent over $100,000 on grid.com and feels that valuable domains can be found for $10. The domain vibrator.com sold for $1 million and of late, toys.com sold for $1.25 million.

James has used his personal experiences in buying domains to arrive at a step by step process that should help you secure the domain you want.

1) Brainstorm Domain Names:

Maintain a list of the niches that interest you. When you look for short attractive names, chances are that they are taken most of the time. But the variations or combinations of those domain names can still be available. To help in your quest, James mentions a great resource called Dotomator.com

2) Check for availability of domains of interest:
Godaddy is a big player in the domain name registration business. You can use their bulk upload features to upload your list of domain names. The interface will tell you which domains are available and which domains have been taken.

Another good domain registration service is instantdomainsearch.com where availability of .com. .net and .org domains can be ascertained and a direct link to Godaddy site for registration of availbale domains is included. You can also do an encrypted search on this site.

3) Visit the auctioneer sites:
Domaintools.com provides a whois lookup of all expired, current and deleted domains. Sedo.com is an excellent site where you search for availability of domains and also park, buy and sell domain names.

4) Prune your domain list:
Domains can be broadly classified into four categories.

a) Real Business:
These are domains used for existing businesses. Such domains are very hard to get as they serve existing business interests. James mentions that he bought the domain trustme.com from an existing business and it was a hard slog getting it and increased the price as well.

b) Domain Squatter pages:
This is a common practice as people look at it as a business venture. Registering the maximum number of possible variations of a word as domains at $10 per head per annum gets the owner revenue if these domains are parked on sedo.com for example and sedo also gets to share the revenue with the owner. A good example is the Kauai.us domain.

Kauai is the oldest of the main Hawaiian islands and is a tourist destination of immense interest. A screenshot of the kauai.us site shows it is a parked domain monetised for Asdsense with the owner hoping that someone would want to hopefully buy it at the “right” price in future.

Such sites are easy to buy as most of them are up for sale. In the above example, there is a Buy this domain sign.

c) Pages with Site Under Construction sign:
There are two ways about it. Either a business is preparing its site for launch or a person has registered it and forgotten about it. Such domains are ideal to target. James has had good success with such domains.

d) Dead Pages:
Nothing comes up when the domain name is typed into the address bar. It is hard to predict whether it is available or not. James talks about the case of nobel.com, a domain owned by an insurance company. He already owned nobelcom.com and he figured it would cost him a fortune if he contacted the CEO about it.

Contacting the VP of the IT divison helped him plead at a human level and the company consented to sell the domain to him. James picked up the domain in lieu of something that would have cost $50,000 or more.

5) Contact the owner:
If a site is for sale, the link displayed or contact us link should enable you to contact the owner. Such messages have a higher success rate in making contact. Use the Wayback Machine to look at the old pages and contact details.

If unsuccessful, use the standard whois on a site like domaintools.com. It also offers a historical whois version.

6) Various approaches to contacting the domain owner:

James feels it is best to contact the owner first and find out if the domain is for sale and not make an offer straightaway.

a) Direct Contact:
If the owner is a student or someone who cannot be searched for on Google, then direct contact is the best way. James says that when he bought the domain grid.com, he had a hard time tracking down the real owner and accidentally revealed his webpreneur details to the owner by email. This mistake raised the stakes by about $50,000.

So, if you have documented success as a buyer, you are best not to reveal it as the status of the buyer can impact the final price.

b) Hiding your details:
A cheap way of making contact with the owner is throug a gmail or yahoo account with username as a pseudonym and the email signed with a name like Joe. This does not elicit much contact from the owner as you may appear to be a scammer.

An expensive way of doing this is through paid services which allow you to mask your details when contacting the owner. Godaddy and Networksolutions offer such services. James has had no success using this technique.

c) Optimal way is to hire a PR or law firm:
Hiring a small town law firm or PR firm has given James the best success in clinching domains like trustme.com and phonetag.com The service costs between $100 and $300. The owner can see she is contacted by a real person from a company and this prevents the price from getting inflated.

7) Domain Valuation:
James says that he has no comparables to evaluate domain name prices. It all boils down to what the owner is asking for. James does not have a budget in mind when approaching owners as he looks at them as assets as in real estate.

8.A rough guide to evaluate the domain name:
a) Number of letters in the domain name:

3 to 4 letter domain names are expensive and can sell between $5,000 and $500,000. A name with 5 letters and more becomes cheaper.

b) Number of words in the domain:
One word domain is high value. The more the number of words, the less valuable it becomes.

c) Easy to spell:
The easier it is to spell the domain name, the more valuable it is.

d) Reason for typing the domain name into the browser:

James draws a parallel between college.com and phonetag.com (he owns the latter). It would be worth getting a traffic analysis report from Compete.com The natural search traffic to college.com woud be much higher compared to phonetag.com

e) Natural flow of the domain name:
The more natural the flow of words is, the higher the domain would appreciate in value. James points out that a word like phone tag would be more natural than a random flow like micro soft (separated by a space).

f) How does this domain name affect your business?
A better domain name is more viral and easy to remember reducing customer acquisition costs. The worth of each customer and the current acquisition cost of each customer need to be factored into the final value.

9) Negotiation:

a) Reacting to ridiculous offers:
James mentions that the owner of bulk.com wanted $800,000 and he offered $35,000. The sale did not go through but owners can be sitting on their high perches with overexpectations.

b) I am not sure – what do you think?
The owner who has this question wants to negotiate for sure. James says he goes in at 20 to 30% below the bottom range of his budget.

NOTE: There can be legal issues here. If you write back saying you can buy it for $5,000 it becomes a legal contract that can be enforced in court. James advises that it is good to put in a rider something like – I can buy for $5,000 pending all terms are agreeable.

c) Spooking the seller:
If you agree to a price straightaway, then the owner is bound to develop sellers remorse concluding that he has underpriced the domain than what it is truly worth. James had this problem when buying grid.com and had to sue the owner to enforce the contract (out of court). Rather than get into legal situations, you would be well off negotiating the price down with the owner.

d) If the price is right:

If you feel that the seller’s price is close to the market price, then there is no need to be over cautious about it. Just settle for it.

10) Get the agreement:
If the seller says yes to your offer, then it is a contract that is enforceable in court. Get the assent in writing. Once that is done, open up an escrow account at escrow.com and transfer the funds at the earliest. The quicker this is done, the harder it is for the seller to back out.

Enjoy the original writeup for 10 tips to buy a domain in its entirety. You cannot fail if you follow this process to the best of your ability depending on your individual cirumstances.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search marketing company offering both natural search and paid search services to their customers in New Zealand and Australia.

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My views and opinions of how the FTC is flawed in its dissection of the blogosphere and Twitterverse as compared to traditional media is reserved for a separate, but imminent post. As a matter of edification, I support the FTC’s mission of protecting the consumer. I just don’t agree with how it lumps earned mentions from meaningful and effective public relations (PR) and paid placement of content either through monetary or product exchanges. There’s a difference and we’ll talk about that later.

In the realm of sponsored posts or tweets, the FTC simply cannot delineate the differences between earned and paid postings and therefore assumes that most consumers are equally oblivious.

With Izea’s impending announcement of a new pay-per-tweet network, combined with existing ad networks and services such as TweetROI, Twittad, and Magpie, the FTC will be forced to pay attention to the paid endorsements in one of Social Media’s most promising and also elusive networks.

As you could possibly imagine, the reality of mass-sponsored tweets will raise a Tweetstorm that will immediately trigger a blogstorm, which will ultimately escalate into full-blown category 5 media hurricane.

But the reality is, whether you agree with them or not, sponsored conversations and paid tweets work when used in the correct situations as a complementary program in addition to other traditional and socially-focused engagement initiatives.

They increase awareness, expand networks, drive sales, build community, promote causes and raise money and awareness, and push traffic.

So, before the chaos and confusion ensues, I wanted to take a proactive role in steering a productive conversation to explore and introduce solutions, ethics, standards, and also reduce the possibility for consumer confusion and potential backlash.

I hosted a virtual summit on the topic via Facebook and invited pundits and industry leaders to discuss:

- The issues and options for meeting FTC guidelines

- The responsibility of brands and participants to provide consumers with information, context and intent

- The inevitable need for guidelines and standardization in disclosure practices

- And how participating in these sponsored conversations might impact the image of the sponsoring brand as well as the brand of the influential voices who lease their stature and social graph how it ultimately affects the dynamic, trust, vibrancy of their community

Disclosure certainly protects all parties involved, but it can also steer perception, which is why this discussion is so critical to the evolution of sponsored conversations.

The debate however, centralizes on the mechanisms and terminology for disclosure and whether or not they are effective when either explicit or implicit in nature.

I introduced options for consideration such as including a symbol or term in each Tweet (TM) that conveyed sponsorship or endorsement such “$,” “spon,” “paid,” “endorsement,” “sponsored” or possibly including an is.gd or bit.ly link to a landing page that could more effectively communicate the nature of the endorsement, ad, promotion, and the intention of the relationship. From the beginning, I did not purport the use of a hashtag “#” in disclosure however.

Stowe Boyd, a fellow digital anthropologist and social architect, and also the creator of Microsyntax.org, shared his views on the implied mindset associated with hashtags, “Generally, hashtags are indicators about the nature of the topic of discussion in a tweet, not the nature of the tweet itself. Note that sponsored tweets might (and often would) have other tags, which would lead to the “adness’ of an ‘#ad not standing out…’”

Credit: PaidPerTweet

As the conversation deepened, the rationale for one standard or solution unlocked a series of challenges that necessitated further exploration and discussion.

As I noted in the forum, the use of “paid” for example, precipitates psychological connotations that will evoke a completely different emotional response as compared to endorsement or sponsorship.

Anders Abrahamsson shared an interesting perspective, “Paid is coming close to that you sold out your integrity – some might call it prostitution.”

In response, Stowe offered a general resolution that resonated with many participants, “My recommendation would be to concoct a new indicator, perhaps ‘AD’, to place at the start of any sponsored Tweet. This has several benefits since anyone would immediately know, at the outset of reading the tweet, that it is sponsored. It stands apart from the tags, which usually appear in a cluster at the end. Also, this would make it easy for tools to build filters to block ADs or to easily find them, depending on your leanings.”

I believe there’s a difference however, between sponsored and paid tweets, one defined by purpose and objective. For example, I enjoy the tweets published by Gary Vaynerchuck and I observe that he has a tremendous following of developing wine enthusiasts, I may choose to either sponsor his Twitter wallpaper and/or his tweet stream. In this case, I don’t necessarily influence his tweets, I simply sponsor them.
This introduces another alternative through the disclosure of relationships directly on Twitter backgrounds.

However, if I pay for tweets specifically, then I expect to dictate the content related to each paid tweet.

Unfortunately, in the eyes of the FTC, they are the same. So, as Stowe says, “I think we should go with the FTC interpretation until the FTC changes it, and lump them all into AD. Note: if people disagree with this convention, they can do what they want. But I feel that biases should be as transparent as possible: as Weinberger wrote, Transparency is the new Objectivity.”

He’s right. However, I disagree with Weinberger. I don’t believe transparency is not the new objectivity at all. Objectivity was compromised the minute that links became the currency of the social Web.

We are biased one way or another when we publish information online. Whether we’re seeking attention, linkbacks, RTs, comments, traffic, feedback, etc. Transparency begets nothing. It is simply a buzzword associated with Social Media. Openness and candor are not substitutes for value, direction, education, or insight.

Brian Carter of TweetROI shared his perspective on sponsored conversations versus ads, “I still haven’t heard a good reason from those who champion transparency why we must disclose only financial motives, not all of them. SP and AD make sense. Surprisingly, even some quality Twitterers, don’t want to change the advertiser’s text. That’s where the concept breaks down-  they agree with the sentiment as written. Everyone interprets payment/ sponsorship differently….”

Ted Murphy of Izea responded with support and support for collaboration, “I am not sure there is one specific answer to this question. The only thing that everyone seems to agree on is there should be some form of clear disclosure required for any tweet where value exchanges hands. I 100% agree.”

Source

At this point, SP and AD become potential preambles for sponsored and paid tweets respectively.

But, Jeremiah Owyang, social technology analyst with Forrester Research, believes that they are not enough, “People won’t understand that ‘AD’ and ‘SP’ imply that those tweets are paid for. We need to be explicit, even if it occupies more characters in the tweet. The only solution is to specifically state, ‘sponsored’ in each…”

Again, I suggest that an included (shortened) URL that directs to a pre-defined page that explains the sponsorship and further clarifies the intentions and benefits of the program is another option to consider. While it’s implicit in nature, it communicates disclosure in a mutually beneficial way that serves the twitterer, the brand, and the reader.

If the leaked Twitter documents, also know as Twittergate, are anything to consider seriously as they relate to this topic, there’s reason to believe Twitter is already thinking about this as a form of revenue generation.

As Jeremiah explained, “Twitter may soon implement color coding or introduce different fonts for sponsored and paid tweets.”

James Eliason of Twittad believes that Twitter should release an API to support color coding as not only a form of disclosure, but also as a measure of preventing spam, “I can tell you from meeting with several Fortune 500 companies over the last several months they are intrigued about this new form of influence marketing if it is done correctly. What many do not want to have happen is the “high-jacking” of a hashtag or ‘ad’ format within this space. Imagine a situation where a large group of users begin doing their own false advertising on behalf of a brand, and simply throw in a #ad, #spon, AD, or SP.  This can not occur.”

Eliason took the case to Twitter co-founder Evan Williams where he recommended that Twitter begin the process of selecting specific ad partner providers to prevent dilution from spam marketers and ensure that the advertising comes from the source through the API. His idea is to assign the API calls from each ad partner through Twitter.com and also third party apps such as TweetDeck, Seesmic, and PeopleBrowsr. He also believes this introduced a new subscription model for users to pay a small fee for a non-ad model across all platforms.

Izea’s Ted Murphy is proactively contributing his ideas towards developing standards and also collaborating directly with the FTC on the establishment of fair guidelines, “They [The FTC] invited me to Washington discuss my thoughts about Universal Disclosure and the current loop holes in the guidelines that need to be closed. Soft-money transactions like free products and trips as well as the definition of experts and celebrities were also discussed. The bottom line is everything should be disclosed.”

He continued, “The biggest hurdle to disclosure standards in social media is not platforms like Sponsored Tweets or TweetROI. It is the PR Practitioners, Social Media Consultants and Brands that don’t enforce disclosure or disclose in different ways. If a tweet from a platform needs to be in different color but a tweet from a tweeter that just got a free trip or video game doesn’t it puts the platforms at a disadvantage. It’s unfortunate, but even organizations like WOMMA don’t have standardized methods of disclosure among members. The only way you will see standardized disclosure in Twitter and all of social media is if the government mandates it (which I am for).”

Indeed. Our challenge isn’t only to unite the industry of sponsored conversation providers around common standards and ethics, we must also encourage marketers to put them into practice.

Whether it’s on Twitter, in blog posts, or in television commercials, paid tweets are technically no different than the array of commercials and advertisements that are available to marketers already. However, they are compartmentalized in function, impression, perception and level of appreciation. And, there are undertones associated with each word that exude contrasting reactions. It all starts with the intention of the campaign and the calculated brand traits/characteristics, values, and sketch of the picture you desire to paint. These steps and measures guide sentiment and activity.

For instance, what comes to mind when I mention:

- Advertisement or ad
- Commercial
- Informercial
- Endorsement
- Sponsored or “brought to you by…”

- Paid placement
- Advertorial

My point is that each one of those words carry hidden meaning and nuances that will not receive due justice or rally support for standardization if represented by a one-word tag within a tweet. This is further complicated by the nature of the disclosure in relation to the essence of the promotion and whether or not it is implicit and explicit in the tweet.

While everyone agrees on the need for standards, and it’s clear that competitors will actually collaborate to help define them, there’s merit and promise in top-down regulation from the FTC and/or Twitter itself. In the meantime, I still believe that including “sponsored” as Jeremiah suggests, providing disclosure on individual wallpaper, or including a link to a page that offers context and clarity (using a custom URL shortener that includes “disclosure” in the construct – for example, disclosure/hgt7), represent credible alternatives in the interim.

However, as Eliason and Murphy note, the FTC and Twitter itself may have to step in to dictate a solution.

Integrity is a priceless commodity...

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As Facebook begins testing greater and greater publicity, with user controls, the EU begins demanding more and more of social networks’ privacy policies—or, that’s what we think their vague regulations are trying to do, anyway.

There are several specific policies that social networks such as MySpace and Facebook, which both have large European audiences, will have to comply with: automatically setting users’ privacy to the highest level (giving users the option to opt out of that extreme level of privacy), allow users to limit the data shared with third-parties (including advertisers and applications), and limit the use of “sensitive information,” including race, religion and political views, in behavioral targeting.

However, many of the regulations, like most laws, are constructed broadly. While broad language in laws avoids the problem of overspecificity, sometimes it becomes difficult for constituents to follow the law. I mean, do you want to define exactly what “legitimate purposes” a network must have to collect personal information?

On the other hand, how could the EU specifically name all the legitimate purposes for collecting data within its regulation? Is targeting birthday-centered promotions from advertisers a “legitimate purpose”? Is enabling your friends to send you virtual birthday gifts “illegitimate”?

What do you think? How can Facebook balance its users’ (and its own legal) need for privacy with its inherent purpose—friending everyone you’ve ever known since elementary school?

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