Future of Media Summit Blog

While privacy can be a very personal issue, the sheer attraction of social software, particularly to the younger generations, could soften what we have come to accept as the norm for privacy protection. Consider the relationship data that a Yahoo, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube has stored on its servers and the gold mine this data would be worth to prospective vendors. These sites currently have mechanisms for protecting ones privacy and quite rightly put the user in control of who they can be contacted by. However, would they lose current users if they softened the protection to enable demographic attributes and other low risk (to identification) profile information to be used or on-sold to marketing research firms? Should we even be concerned? I would suggest that the relationship data currently held by the popular social software vendors is a sleeping giant for a new phase in business/market intelligence.