Social Intelligence Stories That Caught Our Attention: Volume One

Welcome to our new weekly round-up article, sourcing the stories that caught our attention across the web. This week, the focus seems to be on transparency, consent, and privacy. Enjoy.

Facebook’s Ad Library Revamp

We’ve had quite a bit of fun looking at Facebook’s Ad Library revamp over the past few weeks.

Facebook’s Ad Archive first launched in May 2018 and included ads related to politics or policy issues.  But it now shows all active ads about anything, as well as the inactive political and issue ads.

The new Facebook Ad Library attempts to make good on the promise to increase transparency after that whole political influencing sh*tstorm.   It tells you when the page was set-up, if there’s been any name changes and the locations where the page is managed from.  As well as any active ads currently running.

Here’s what’s running for Benefit Cosmetics in Ireland.

A great way to see where your competitors are sending their cash on Facebook or even where your own company’s spending is going in different territories.  We can’t help but think this move for transparency has bigger implications for competitive benchmarking.

StatSocial’s Distributed Personal Information Aggregator

We had a blinding conversation a couple of weeks ago about StatSocial’s new patent for what they are calling a “Distributed Personal Information Aggregator”.

They’ve been waiting 10 years on the patent.  And, you can tell.

Take a look for yourself.

It’s official - our “Distributed Personal Information Aggregator” patent has been granted. It only took us ten years. ⁦@StatSocial⁩ pic.twitter.com/3PoTHYQq9W

— Michael Hussey CC (@husseymichael) April 9, 2019

From the brief look you get, for us folks in the EU or analyzing EU data, this looks like a GDPR nightmare waiting to happen.

Which leads us swiftly onto….

Duty to Read the Unreadable

Have you read the terms and conditions of the social networking sites you analyse data from recently?

Chances are that you take it for granted that the data you get in your social listening tool means you can legally access and process that data.  But, does it really?

We’ve been speaking to some government contacts recently and their need to prove that the data sources they analyze from the web is respectful of the terms and conditions of that site and does not negatively impact consumer privacy.

In this research article, Benoliel et al (2019) explore consumers duty to read the unreadable.  Are the sign-in wrap contracts of online sites written in a way that dissuades consumers from reading them?  The research finds that the readability level of these agreements is set at too high a level for the general public.  So, yes. Yes, they do dissuade people from reading them.

When it comes to social data analysis, do consumers know what they are signing up for?  And, as the analyst, have we really read all the terms and conditions of the sites we analyze? Or do the terms and conditions not matter as much if we’re not actually doing anything illegal?

Cleaning Our Social Profiles

Ever gone back and culled your old social posts? What if everyone did it?

Well, there is a new app for that.  In the wake of consumer data privacy Jumbo the privacy assistant for iOS helps users clean up their social profiles.

Meaning historical data could be impacted.

If your social intelligence work goes over and above monitoring brand mentions [which it should] then we’ve always been proponents of using forums, blogs and other types of social data.

With consumers cleaning up their ‘traditional’ social profiles, it may be that forums and other data sources become more important to research – which they should!

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