Paying Through Facebook May Become a Reality 122
SmartAboutThings writes "A recent story at the NY Times talks about a possible partnership between Facebook and mobile billing company Bango. 'You might want to buy a game or concert tickets or an astrological forecast. Careful where your fingers go. One tap, and a charge will show up on your phone bill. "Frictionless" payment is how Bango puts it. Bango will get a cut of each click; it declined to say how much.' Assuming this doesn't remain a rumor, then quite soon we might be able to pay for goods using our Facebook accounts. Could this help Facebook regain the lost trust for their investors?"
Re:Right (Score:4, Interesting)
If you never made a Facebook account, congratulations. You are beyond the test. If you made one sometime ago but stopped using it, again congratulations, everyone makes a mistake once in a while, it's part of being human. If you still have an active Facebook account, that's strike one.
I understand the dislike, distrust and sometimes even hatred of things like facebook, but assuming that anyone with an active facebook account isn't aware of the issues seems to be a common mistake around here.
I have a facebook account. I actively use it. I also understand that anything I put there (or others put there about me) (whether marked as private or not) is potentially as public as me scrawling it in 50 metre high letters on the side of a public building in the middle of town (however significantly more socially acceptable).
I still choose to use it, because it's a good way to keep in touch with my many friends around the world; post pictures of my daughter growing up for anyone who cares to see that; organise events with friends in an easy to manage interface; and so on. I do block pretty much every game, "application" and so on and it's almost beyond the pale to imagine I would ever consider using such a payment system as the one described; however that doesn't mean I have to get rid of using facebook altogether - just don't use what you don't want (and remember the thing about scrawling your information in public, as already mentioned).
I do NOT fear things like potential employers/future business partners/whatever seeing that I was out at a party drunk one day. Anyone who refuses to hire me for that, isn't someone I want to work for/do business with/etc.
Re:Privacy (Score:4, Interesting)
Ah, good 'ol loyalty cards. I prefer disloyalty cards [thestar.com]. ;)
Anyway, it's a mix. Yes, they want to motivate you to keep coming back. But these stores also like to know crazy amounts of information about you. Aka, not just what's disappearing in a particular store, but what's being consumed by what demographics, what's bought at the same time, etc, to help determine product positioning, marketing campaigns, and so forth. Here's a crazy article on the lengths some companies go [nytimes.com]. The first paragraph, as a teaser: