Great idea but, more to the point, brilliant marketing.

Cotton Delo of Ad Age:

The targeting would hypothetically enable Coca-Cola to target to teenagers who’ve bought soda in the last month, or Pampers to show ads to North Carolina residents who’ve recently bought baby products, since Facebook’s own array of demographic and interest-based targeting options can be added to further refine audience segments. But adoption will be contingent on acceptance by corporate legal departments wary of becoming embroiled in a consumer privacy scare.

It’s not something I would rush into if I was one of those “corporate legal departments.” It’s not that I have some conspiracy theory about Facebook, or those data banks. I don’t. We give data to those data banks willingly when we use those discount cards. Shame on us for not reading the fine print.

And Facebook? They’re the same: the fact that nothing private is guaranteed to stay that way on the internet is common knowledge these days, and those who don’t know should know.

What would worry me as in-house counsel is what hackers will find when they inevitably get their hands on some of this data. In other words, Facebook and data banks are the devils we know. I would keep clients out of this plan because of the devils we don’t know.