Hello everyone! The past many weeks have kept us very busy and we did not keep you updated. For this we apologize.

We are very excited to tell you that we are officially in pre-launch.  What does this mean?  Those of you who signed up for the FREE PRO Membership will received an e-mail next week telling you how to claim your free membership. Be on the look out for that!

Our FREE UPGRADE offer is about to end.  There is still time so claim yours today, so please sign-up.

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Let’s assume that you’re a big-time Facebook user. You eat, sleep, and breathe Facebook.  Or, perhaps you just stop by every week or so to see what’s happening with your friends.  Either way, the recent privacy changes made by Facebook could have your contact information (and your friends’ contact information) zipping around the Internet like crazy.

If you’re the type of person who doesn’t think stuff like this really happens, I need you to pay close attention.  And read this article.

Rogue Marketers Can Mine Your Info on Facebook

Got an e-mail list of customers or readers and want to know more about each — such as their full name, friends, gender, age, interests, location, job and education level? Facebook has just the free feature you’re looking for, thanks to its recent privacy changes. The hack, first publicized by blogger Max Klein, repurposes a Facebook feature that lets people find their friends on Facebook by scanning through e-mail addresses in their contact list. But as Klein points out, [...]

Related articles by Zemanta

• Marketers can mine your Facebook info (cnn.com)
• Yes, Rogue Marketers Can Steal Your Public Facebook Data (allfacebook.com)

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A big part of the ClickNation mission is to help you control access to your personal information. That’s why you can count on us to keep you informed about online privacy issues that we think you really need to pay attention to.  Facebook, for example, made a not-so-subtle change in its privacy policy this week that really opens the door for how much of your personal information is made public.

Public Posting is Now the Default on Facebook

Facebook users who don’t adjust their privacy settings will begin publishing their status updates and photos to the entire internet Wednesday, a change made by Facebook in its simplification of its privacy tools in order to keep up with the popularity of micro-publishing sites like Twitter. Facebook users logging in Wednesday will see [...]

The change isn’t really surprising, given the results of some new research that shows a lot of Facebook users aren’t very careful (or concerned) about what information they provide.

User Data Easier Than Ever to Phish on Facebook, New Study Shows

Would you give a complete stranger your email address and date of birth? How about personal information about your friends? If results of a new study on Facebook user behavior is any indication, around half of us would answer “yes” to those questions, depending on how old we are. The study also shows that Facebook users are becoming more lax with protecting their [...]

Obviously, ClickNation recommends a conservative approach when it comes to providing your personal information and allowing it to be circulated on the Internet. If you have any questions about how to do this, post a question in the comments and we’ll help you!

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We are as bothered as most of you by the over-abundance of “updates” that show up in our email. Many online marketers use just about ANY reason to send out an “update”, just to keep their name in front of you. While there is some justification for such a philosophy, there’s also a big downside.

…US Internet users deluged with mass e-mails have little time for irrelevant promotions and newsletters, and they have enough experience to know how to unsubscribe. More than nine in 10 respondents to the CMO Council survey had unsubscribed from an e-mail newsletter at some point. Relevance—or lack thereof—was the [...]

That’s why all of us at myclicknation.com vow to hit our “send” button ONLY when there’s a real reason to send out an update. That’s why you’ll soon have the opportunity to sign up for our newsletter; and we promise you’ll only see one when there is something newsworthy to pass along.  We want to make sure you remain a part of the myclicknation.com family for a long, long time!

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All you have to do is read a few of the reports coming out of the Direct Marketing Association meeting this past week in San Diego and you’ll realize that the entire industry is buzzing with debate over the impact of social media.

In fact, social media has bubbled to the surface in marketing conversations as a highly effective means to reach customers, and direct marketers are currently exploring ways to both exploit the medium and quantify its effectiveness. They are also looking closely at the delicate balance between gaining enough information to target customers based on behavior and interests, while not bumping up against privacy […]

So, the DMA obviously has some issues to address. One of the biggest is that privacy issue. There could be legislation coming down the pike that pushes back against the basic way they’ve done business for a long time. Jerry Cerasale, SVP of government affairs for the DMA:

“We’ll see a bill on that probably in the new year in 2010,” Cerasale says. The potential danger, he explains, is “if regulations become heavy-handed where you have to opt-in to things like that, it will change the nature and value of advertising on the Internet.”

Stand by for more on the Clicknation concept and how it could impact YOU as these changes come into play!

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We’ve talked before about how Clicknation believes that you deserve something in return when companies use your personal information. Currently, only the middleman is making money.  The big question many of you are probably asking is the most basic of all: how much is my information worth?

We’ll be explaining the financial implications in much more detail as we move forward, but let’s start with the simplest example – your email. Even though the prices are slipping, we think you’ll be surprised when you see the value.

Consumer E-Mail Price List Prices Continue to Fall: Worldata

E-mail list prices, long notorious for being among the costliest files in marketing, are continuing their price slide, according to list firm Worldata. Permission-based e-mail consumer lists, which averaged $150 per thousand in fall 2008, dropped to $114 per thousand in […]

Want another way of looking at it? Consider this:

E-mail ROI Still Stunning, Still Slipping

Commercial e-mail returned a whopping $43.62 for every dollar spent on it in 2009, according to the DMA’s just-released Power of Direct economic-impact study—an effort the trade organization publishes every year at its annual fall conference. For comparison’s sake, […]

Read the full articles and you’ll begin to realize how much money is being made by selling permission to contact you, based on information about yourself that you may not even realize you gave up. It doesn’t seem fair, does it? That’s what Clicknation has set out to change. Just keep an eye open for our updates!

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Dark Stalking On Facebook

…The results were disturbing. I didn’t just get back future events my friends were attending. I got everything they had been invited to: past and present, attending or not. I didn’t sleep well that night. I didn’t expect Facebook to share past event info. I didn’t expect it to share info when people had declined those events. I haven’t found any way of retrieving friends’ past events using Facebook’s website, but using FQL made it easy. Somehow, implicitly, I thought old events would fade away, only viewable to those who already knew about them. I didn’t expect them to […]

Now, you should begin to understand why Clicknation wants to help you CONTROL the information flow between you and those who want to know more about you!

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Data Mining the Mint.com Demographic

…Mint is now aggregating data from its 1.5 million users and mining it for personal spending trends. To demonstrate the concept, Mint launched its Trends page three weeks ago with some teaser data, like graphs about the decline of the newspaper industry and the […]

Here’s the main point to think about – many people don’t mind sharing that information in exchange for a free service (like Mint.com). Wouldn’t it be great if you could be paid for providing that data?

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Harvard Business School professor John Deighton has been promoting the idea that consumers should be able to capitalize on the value of their personal information and get something of value in return. In essence, you should be paid for your private information.  Deighton writes that the current laws regulating consumer privacy are outdated and should be replaced:

The information age needs to rest on something more robust than regulation. If business is in this for the long haul, it needs to explain to government that the secure foundation for the new go-to-market regime is institutional, not rule-based. What kind of institution? One that pays consumers for their data in money or in positive experiences by creating for them a valued identity.

You’re on the verge of being able to do exactly what Deighton is talking about – control yourself and your information. Keep checking back and I’ll tell you how.

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