UmeNow calls Facebook a predator (video)

As part of its “Facebook is Trash, National Privacy Celebration” marketing campaign, UmeNow, a new social network that wants to kill Facebook, is calling the social network a predator. As you can see above, the latest video released by the company implies that an innocent picture posted on Facebook can spread around the globe into the hands of people never meant to see it.

Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes the minimum age limit should be removed eventually, allowing those under 13-years-old to create an account on the social network. UmeNow argues that since your photos shared on Facebook are sometimes seen by people who are not your friends online, this could one day happen with photos of your child.

“My biggest concern is that not only does Mark Zuckerberg and his company want to seize all the information it can on adults like you and me so he can make money selling ads, but Facebook also wants to snatch away the precious privacy of your kids,” UmeNow founder Evelyn Castillo-Bach said in a statement. “I believe Facebook wants to grab as much personal information as it can about our children, so they can track their habits, stalk their thoughts, and target their friends, compiling everything into giant databases to profit from a child’s innocence. When will Facebook stop? It stops right here and right now. They’ll stop because of UmeNow.”

“We don’t ‘like’ Facebook,” Castillo-Bach continued. “Where’s the button for that? Who really likes Facebook? People use it by default. Who ‘likes’ seeing ads all the time? Who ‘likes’ being watched, analyzed and tracked? And now they want to add children into the mix? I don’t think so. Not if I have anything to do with it. It takes a mother to finally put this arrogant know-it-all billionaire and his company in its place. Enough! Don’t touch our kids.”

UmeNow has a $6.00 monthly subscription fee (you can sign up for a one-month free trial), which gives you the following features:

• No ads.
• No tracking and No data mining.
• No selling of personal information.
• All third party apps banned.
• Anonymous posting allowed.
• Protection from privacy violations by “free” sites.

Last month, Facebook announced a major revamp of its privacy settings (Photo Gallery). Although security experts still see room for improvement, the overall consensus is that this is a step forward.

The changes make it very clear who you are sharing something with on Facebook: you can choose public, just your friends, just a group of friends, or hand-pick specific friends. Of course, it’s possible that one or more of your Facebook friends will then share your status update, link, photo, or video with someone else, but that’s how the Web works (and this can easily happen on UmeNow as well). The bottom line is this: if you don’t want to risk a piece of content from being shared with others online, don’t upload it to the Internet.

See also:

• UmeNow vows to kill Facebook, dismisses Google+
• Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook minimum age limit should be removed
• Facebook starts rolling out facial recognition feature worldwide
• EU to probe Facebook over facial recognition feature
• Germany: Facebook facial recognition feature violates privacy laws
• Germany: Facebook Like button violates privacy laws

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The Facebook Anthill

The brilliance of Facebook is its ability to beguile its 700 million-odd users into building digital heaps, some of which are called “fan pages” and are for celebrities, TV programs, political causes,  commercial products, etc. (Brands do this as well, but that’s another column.) While people may believe this merely builds a social network containing real world friends and cyber like-minded ones, we’re actually just worker ants in Facebook’s ingenious business model, clicking and getting friends to click “like” buttons on these and other pages.
     A page created by an Angelina Jolie fan, for example, has some 2.1 million “likes.” Facebook offers this digital heap to advertisers as a “specific interest,” with ads appearing on the homepage of every “fan”  who clicks on “like.” The advertiser buys this access either on a per-click or per-impression basis, and can apply a number of demographic filters such as age, location, and education. The price per click or impression is determined by a computerized auction.
     These heaps, however, are not time sensitive or updated. Unlike Google’s AdWords, in which one can match key words—e.g., “cheap Botox”—to people searching for those words, Facebook’s digital heaps can accumulate over many years. So, they may reflect bygone, rather than present, interests.
I discovered problems with Facebook’s anthills when I sought to advertise my own ebooks. I learned that even as a diligent worker ant—one without a fan page—I cannot reach my own 800 cyber friends for free. The reason: Facebook limits the exposure of what’s posted to a handful of friends with whom you have been in recent contact.
     So, I bought ads, which Facebook makes easy for anyone with $50. For my ebook, Killing Castro (which included a CIA report), I chose such “specific interests” as the CIA, Castro, JFK, and Oliver Stone, which should have reached Facebook fans of those subjects. I put my ad on those fan pages and paid the suggested $1.60/click. The ad, which has to be shorter than a tweet, went to 56,000 people, received 36 clicks, and sold six books, which was far less than the 211 copies sold by a brief blog on the Atlantic Wire. 
    Unfortunately, I had to end the campaign because the click cost itself exceeded my royalty, reminding me of the moron joke about a manufacturer who loses money on each item but hopes to make it up on volume.
     Even if Facebook did not work for me, it obviously works for others as it has a reported market value of $60 billion. To explore this further, I talked to executives at film studios that produce movies geared to teens reachable on Facebook.
     In 2011, the major studios are spending between $2 million and $2.5 million for online marketing on major releases. As it was explained to me, how much, if any, of that budget goes to Facebook depends largely on the type of movie. Original films, such as Midnight in Paris, Blood Diamond, and Crazy, Stupid, Love, are considered a waste of money on Facebook since they have no large pre-existing heap of digital fans. But with sequels, such as the Harry Potter, X-Men, and Spiderman series, fan pages are seen as highly effective investments because they gear the Facebook ads to teens who have previously “liked” films in the series.  
     Harry Potter, for example, has 4.3 million “likes” on its fan page. Even if a studio has to pay $3.60 a click, which is nearly its share of a ticket, it’s worth it for building awareness because, by its own reckoning, the average male teenager “shares” with 130 Facebook friends. The fan page is also, as one executive pointed out, “a particularly effective place to tell these fans when tickets are available online.” 
     So, while Facebook may provide yet another reason for studios to greenlight sequels, it in no way replaces the need for many millions of dollars in TV spot ads to drive audiences into multiplexes. The average marketing budget is above $34 million for a Hollywood sequel—and only a small fraction of that goes to Facebook ads.
    Perhaps even more damning: Even with whatever enhancements come from Facebook’s “like” piles, total movie ticket sales are down 5.2 percent this year.

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