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In the INSEMTIVES project, we are interested to find how to get people to provide more semantic data on the web. This can be very complex annotations of text or simple tagging of images.
For tagging of images, Facebook is a quite good example of how to do it simply and how to provide incentives for tagging. As BJ Fogg discuss it in the video below, tagging of photos, notes, etc. is quite important to facebook. It is a “persuasive” trigger to get people to come back to the site.
How Tags Persuade Facebook Users
First, for Facebook, it is important to get people to connect to their website, it allows them to deliver advertising to the users and thus make a living out of their service. As BJ Fogg explains in the video, when someone is tagged by a friend, they will receive a persuasive trigger (email notification for example) to go and see what photo of them was tagged. This is a great “free” way of getting someone trusted to bring you back to their site.
In addition, it is also important for Facebook to have content tagged as it provides more information to profile users and tailor advertising. This allows them to sell the ad space for a better price than a random ad placement. We can assume that this is one of the core of their business model and, thus, how and if they do it is not made public. But we can assume that in addition to bringing people back to their site, tags have this second use for them.
There are thus at least two reasons for Facebook to want you to tag content with your name and your friends name. Now, what can they do to make you tag more? What incentives can they user?
I am sure there are many out there, but, for now, I will focus on the privacy settings as an incentives for the users to tag their own photos.
We have seen in the last year a lot of ”scandals” about people lacking privacy on Facebook and getting in all sort of trouble from the photos that were posted of them:
- Barrow teacher done in by anonymous “parent” e-mail about her Facebook page
- Benefits lost ‘because of Facebook’
- …
People are now starting to realise that they have to protect the content they put on Facebook. And indeed, the company has realised they could use this to their advantage. Since a little while, you can find, for photos and videos, the following privacy settings:
This means that, if you have tagged a photo of you (or a friend of you does), then you can control clearly who can see it or not.
In fact, this is theoretically a great incentives, for the ones that understand the privacy setting, to have you tag your photos. Facebook makes it clear to you: if you want your photos to be private, then tag them, tag them! tag them!!
They are not actually asking you to do it, or telling you they need you to do it for their business model to work, they are just telling you that it is your problem and your responsibility to tag your content if you want to control your privacy.
Now, the question is if people really understand that this privacy feature is there and if it pushes them to tag more. I guess Facebook knows 
