Facebook Plans to Make Money by Selling Friends?

Time to close the Facebook account…

Facebook is planning to exploit the vast amount of personal information it holds on its 150m members by creating one of the world’s largest market research databases. – from Telegraph

Starting this spring, companies will be able to selectively target Facebook’s members in order to research the appeal of new products through a polling system called Engagement Ads as demonstrated at the World Economic Forum in Davos. – from RRW

Facebook has been experimenting with real-time polls in Davos this year and also have been rolling out the Engagement Ads system that is designed to leverage Facebook’s vast amount of data on users to improve targeted advertising, but claims that they’ll be turning the social network into one of the “world’s largest market research databases” seem to be a bit over the top in any case.

Update – here’s Facebook’s response:

“The polls run at the World Economic Forum were not part of a commercially available product for advertisers and should not be confused with Facebook’s Engagement Ads. At WEF, Facebook ran a series of polls to provide the Davos audience with real-time insight into the opinions of people outside of the conference. These polls were conducted on Facebook using internal tools.

- from Techcrunch