All this is going to do is make more people enter fake information.

In fact, I kinda hate it when a social networking site asks information that they don’t need to know. If there isn’t a good reason besides advertising why they need to know my exact address (isn’t my city and zip code good enough?), or my phone number? My phone number? Are you kidding me? Is Facebook going to call me for something, or just sell my info to the telemarketers?

Listen, I think it’s about time they stopped asking for an address. City and state and possibly zip code is fine to ask for because that information gets turned into non personally identifiable information. So even age would be ok, race, and a few others. But when you ask my address, I know that you’re not intending to group me into some geographical statistical analysis, as you could have done that with nothing more than my city, state, and zip code. They’re obviously looking to sell that information to the advertisers and want us to say yes about it.

Well I say no!

You don’t need to know certain information about me to get a better profile.
My street address and phone number are for one thing only, contacting me.
Why would facebook need to contact me?

They only way that Facebook would ever need such information is if they required it’s users to verify themselves by having Facebook either call their landline, or mail them some post card with a pin number on it (like Google Adsense does to verify their 3rd party publishers of Adsense).

First, who would want to go through such a verification process for a social site?
Second, if Facebook did find a way that people wouldn’t just forget about Facebook entirely for requiring verification, I’m sure it would crack down on fake accounts and you could actually ban a person for doing bad things on Facebook and they wouldn’t be able to use the same address or name to register a new account with.

I just don’t trust them. Their goal seems to get as much of personally identifiable information as they can on their members and sell it to advertisers. What ever happened to advertisers simply asking for it? Remember the days of mailing lists? You’d walk into some shop and somebody would ask you if you would like to sign up for the mailer? At least then you knew what to expect. So I caution Facebook at trying to create a one-stop consent form so that millions of advertisers can flood it’s members with advertisements. I might want mail from one advertiser, but not the next.

Which brings me to the question of why should the advertiser target me and I automatically get some junk mail from them I never wanted? Because they paid for it to happen? So all it takes is money and my consent and Facebook is ok sending me spam on behalf of their advertisers? Can’t I pick the advertiser after I’ve been targeted? So let’s say 20 advertisers were looking for men between the age of 30-40 that live only in California. So I’d see the list of advertisers that wanted to send me information based on my anonymous profile and I could choose out of those advertisers which ones I wanted to have send me something. Could be a coupon, maybe just an advertisement for the product, or whatever. Just that I should be expecting it and not surprised when something comes in the mail I didn’t ask for.

I think Facebook needs to take a lesson out of Google’s playbook. Let the members control their information and they’ll be happier to give some of it to them for purposes that the members allow. Not Google, not Facebook, not anybody but the member should control that information. It also should be made clear the intended uses of that information that was made available and who exactly has access to that information and the ability to revoke that access by the member at any time.