Within days, friends of Mr. Bergus started seeing his post among the ads on Facebook pages, with his name and smiling mug shot. Facebook — or rather, one of its algorithms — had seen his post as an endorsement and transformed it into an advertisement, paid for by Amazon.
In Facebook parlance, it was a sponsored story, a potentially lucrative tool that turns a Facebook user’s affinity for something into an ad delivered to his friends.
johnhh
9:01 pm on Jun 1, 2012 (gmt 0)
Yes, this came up in a recent BBC documentary on Facebook, the question was asked to a Facebook executive why just liking a product created an advert without specific user permission
The executive was unable to answer the question.. which was fun to see him squirm.
The documentary wasn't very good as they just used an old documentary and added some new bits.
