A marketing professional had expressed his concern regarding Facebook’s (FB) new Home software; a program for the home screens of android cell phones. This act is contrary to popular belief that marketers often employ pervasive techniques to entice probable clients.
Angus Wood, the executive of the digital marketing firm iProspect told The Telegraph, a news site based in the United Kingdom that this move from FB would be invasive and tedious. Wood added that the ads might repel consumers from using FB’s service. In his statement, Wood said: “Facebook are unlocking a vast amount of consumers’ time. But alongside that, the closer you come to the consumer, the softer you need to tread, and the bar for content quality will be higher than ever.”
The iProspect executive explained that Facebook should limit its new program to certain ads that are truly relevant to its users. This is to prevent some users from being annoyed. For Wood, an over-frequent marketing within a personal space like that of a cell phone home screen will instantly turn off the users of Home.
Meanwhile, Facebook is bound to advertise the use of Home through their Cover Feed on April 12, 2013. Aside from the alleged pervasive ad, some analysts were also critical if this will enable FB to accumulate excessive personal data from people who will use the new program. The founder of a technology news website GigaOM, Om Malik stated: “Facebook Home should put privacy advocates on alert, for this application erodes any idea of privacy.”Not only that, Malik added that the smartphones have the possibility to send the General Positioning System (GPS) of the user. This meant that Facebook would know where the phone is, located and possibly its owner at any given time. Surely, FB will amass more control over certain data that were available in the internet.
Malik further explained that if a phone will fail to move from a specific location between 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. in a week or more, FB could instantaneously deduce the location of the home of its user. The GigaOM founder also encouraged all people that they need the help of legal representatives since FB is bound to invade privacy. His specific statement was –
“We need to ask our legislative representatives to understand that Facebook wants to go from our desktops and browsers right into our home — the place where we need to be private”.
Facebook garnered all the aforementioned criticisms, after Mark Zuckerberg, the current chief executive of Facebook unveiled Facebook Home in a press conference in California. News reports say that FB had also launched a partnership with HTC First – a smartphone with a built-in Home program.
Zuckerberg previously narrated that these days; the designs of phones revolve around applications and not for people, which led to the creation of the Home application. This particular application has an edge over other apps through Chat Heads, a feature that will allow users to send as well as read text and Facebook messages without going back to the home page of the app.