I just shut down my Facebook account.

Yesterday I received the following Facebook message by email:

Jody sent you a message.

--------------------

Subject: People, check this out!

You guys gotta to check this out, this nifty little website tells you exactly your secret crush:
http://best-love-finder.info

Input your info like I did, you will be VERY surprised with the results!
Peace!

As marketers, you should immediately understand how significant it is that Jody is a trusted, long-time friend. As such, he has a lot of influence in my life. Last week, he recommended the book I am currently reading. From a marketing point of view, that kind of influence is unparalleled.

And that's exactly what Facebook is selling. Facebook can deliver a trusted network of friends and relatives to advertisers, along with intricately detailed demographic profiles which include hobbies, personal interests, geographical location, sex, age, race, religion, political beliefs, favourite movies, music, and more.

If that weren't enough, Facebook partnerships with leading retailers like Amazon, mean that instead of Jody recommending a book in the course of an email conversation, Jody can now use Amazon Grapevine to tell Facebook to automatically alert all his friends when he buys a book, as a form of not-so-subtle social network marketing.

In the face of a phishing scam however, the value of Facebook plummets. It suddenly becomes obvious that Facebook's value is entirely dependent on the trust implicit in friend and family relationships. Cleverly - and devastatingly - the scam above exploits the trusted nature of friends, family and the Facebook network to trick users into providing all the profile information they supply Facebook with to a 3rd party. Not only does the phishing scam exploit people's trust to 'steal' Facebook's demographic profiles, it undermines the trust in the Facebook network, and worse - it undermines the trust of messages from friends and family. Suddenly, friends and family are not the trusted influences we took them to be.

While I appreciate the value of a trusted network with spam-free messaging amongst my friends, as soon as Facebook is compromised, it loses all value. In fact, it has a negative value. It's a liability. Like anyone else, about 9 out of every 10 email messages I get are spam or phishing messages. However, I do not get phishing messages sent from my friends, and I don't want to have to start carefully evaluating messages from my friends now. I need to be able to have some degree of trust that messages from my friends are actually from my friends.

Fortunately, there's a simple solution. I emailed Jody to ask whether I really ought to check out best-love-finder.

Jody writes:
Spam bot. I got some from someone else and it went through my account. I just shut down my facebook account because of it.

Me too - as you know, my friends are very influential.

Brad Bell