Online social networks – MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, and the like – are becoming important arenas for youth political engagement, as teens and young adults use them to mobilize others to vote, challenge corporate authority, and fight for new laws. Just this week, MySpace teamed up with MTV to host an online dialogue with Democratic Presidential candidate, Barack Obama, inviting youth to log onto the site’s instant messaging feature to ask questions in real time.

In recent months, these popular sites have been incorporating more and more interactive advertising into their platforms. The new model for digital marketing is behavioral targeting – the topic of last week’s town hall meeting at the Federal Trade Commission. On social networks, this means using every bit of information an individual posts about herself to compile personal profiles, and then using those profiles for targeted “one-to-one” marketing. As I explained in a public radio commentary this week, these practices are quickly transforming social networks into data collection and ad targeting machines. Such trends not only raise serious consumer privacy issues, but also threaten to undermine youth civic and political participation on the Internet. For a detailed account of the most recent behavioral marketing trends and their implications for democracy in the Digital Age, see the Center for Digital Democracy’s FTC filing. (Available as a PDF via this press release.)

This is an issue that is just beginning to surface publicly. The advertising industry would like to keep its new interactive marketing practices a secret, but groups like CDD, U.S. PIRG, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) are determined to educate the public and policy makers about what is at stake and what can be done. I hope members of this Free Press Action Network will get involved in this effort.