Facebook takes sharing further with Social Ads: You like this, and everyone knows it

Last Friday Facebook introduced ‘Social Ads’, which means you could now see your friends’ names and pictures appear next to ads on the social networking site.

This means, if you ‘like’ a page, event or any other item on Facebook, you may be spreading the word a little further than you might have intended. For the moment, this information will only be shared with your friends, Facebook assures, so it’s not so bad.

But the wording on the Facebook privacy policy is less than reassuring this is the way it will always be:

“Facebook does not give third party applications or ad networks the right to use your name or picture in ads. If this is allowed in the future, this setting will govern the usage of your information.”

So you may want to adjust the privacy option on this right away, or find that advertisers start using you in spreading the word – even if it’s just to your friends for now.

Only last month Facebook changed the function of its ‘like’ button to become a sharing tool, meaning if you hit the ‘like’ button now, a full story with a headline, blurb and thumbnail will be posted to your wall. … It’s getting a bit much with all this sharing, isn’t it. We appreciate Facebook is a social site for friends, but does that mean we want every single one of our old primary school classmates knowing our business? We think not.