Facebook to Allow Users to Login with Less Info
According to The Boston Globe, Facebook announced in late April that, “its 1.3 billion users would soon be able to limit the information they reveal to other websites or mobile applications when they log in through their Facebook identities.” In short, Facebook to allow users to login with less info.
The idea behind this move is to address users’ concerns about revealing their personal data just to check out a website.
Anonymous Logins?
The enormous social networking site is also considering making it possible for users to log into other sites anonymously. That is, the login would be anonymous to the other site, but not to Facebook.
Talk about a login with less info.
Because, of course, Facebook wants to gather (presumably) anonymous data. So, this is for the purpose of aggregating it and better understanding user behavior.
Facebook Has Become a Monster
One of the reasons why Facebook has grown so enormous (1.3 billion users) is because it reveals such intimate details to online businesses. Businesses can routinely scan likes. A large percentage of us reveal our birth dates. Outside businesses sometimes even get a share of photos and friend lists.
The aggregation of quantitative data (we are studying this at Quinnipiac, in ICM 524, which is the Social Media Analytics class) is vital to any number of sites understanding people’s behavior on the web.
The truth is, any person who believes that any of their clicks are not being counted, timed, compared, or otherwise measured is in for a real surprise. They are. And this is not necessarily any sort of a bad thing, I might add. For to best understand data, there really does need to be an awful lot of it. And what better site to bring a lot of data than the behemoth itself, Facebook?
Caveat clicker.