Paying Through Facebook May Become a Reality

SmartAboutThings writes "A recent story at the NY Times talks about a possible partnership between Facebook and mobile billing company Bango. 'You might want to buy a game or concert tickets or an astrological forecast. Careful where your fingers go. One tap, and a charge will show up on your phone bill. "Frictionless" payment is how Bango puts it. Bango will get a cut of each click; it declined to say how much.' Assuming this doesn't remain a rumor, then quite soon we might be able to pay for goods using our Facebook accounts. Could this help Facebook regain the lost trust for their investors?"

Comments

Do people really want this?

[wcrowe]

Great. Then FB will broadcast to all your friends what it is you just bought. Glad I left over a year ago.

Huzza!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I confidently predict that a blissful union of the non-sleaziness of mobile billing, the upstanding nature of Facebook, and the excellent security of consumer client devices will lead to excellent customer satisfaction and only the most minimal of fraud and billing disputes.

Investors? How about users?

[gstoddart]

Could this help Facebook regain the lost trust for their investors?

Only if they can gain the trust of a fair amount of users.

I use Facebook, but under a fake name with as little personal information as I can give them. There's no way I'd trust Facebook with financial information.

I've no doubt that at least some users will think this is grand, but there's no way I'd ever use this. Their level of trust from me is arms length and suspicious.

This is what they mean by "frictionless"

[dkleinsc]

The goal here is to make payment so easy that you don't have the time to reconsider the purchase decision while, for instance, you're pulling out your wallet to get out your credit card. These are people that firmly believe that the way to make the world a better place is to make it easier for them to buy stuff whether or not it is of any use to them whatsoever. I know, because I've attended one of the major conferences in the industry and met some of these folks and listened to their talks about this sort of technology.

And of course, what makes it easy for a legitimate business to take your money also makes it easy for a not-so-legitimate business or a thief to take your money.

Re:Right

[causality]

I understand the dislike, distrust and sometimes even hatred of things like facebook, but assuming that anyone with an active facebook account isn't aware of the issues seems to be a common mistake around here.

Thinking that you can play footsies with the Devil and never ever get burned is another very common mistake.

Or saying that you have a set of principles by which you recognize certain companies' behavior as evil, exploitative, maladaptive, undesirable, etc ... and then participating in those companies' offerings anyway, well that's another all-too-common mistake. It always seems like your own individual contribution is a tiny drop in a big bucket, but then masses of people make this mistake and it really matters.

I still choose to use it, because it's a good way to keep in touch with my many friends around the world; post pictures of my daughter growing up for anyone who cares to see that; organise events with friends in an easy to manage interface; and so on. I do block pretty much every game, "application" and so on and it's almost beyond the pale to imagine I would ever consider using such a payment system as the one described; however that doesn't mean I have to get rid of using facebook altogether - just don't use what you don't want (and remember the thing about scrawling your information in public, as already mentioned).

What "I don't want" is to ever make more successful a company that does business this way. What "I don't want" is to ever feel like no one ever had any way to keep in touch before the advent of Facebook. What I especially "don't want" is to promote the kind of culture surrounding Facebook. Joining them would be the same as giving my silent consent. In most relationships of abuse and exploitation, what you describe above is called being an enabler. You see, it's not a matter of features.

There is no convenience Facebook could ever offer me that would convince me to overlook their attitude towards their users. It is definitely not an attitude of respect and appreciation. It's more like the attitude a farmer has towards his livestock. That's simply unacceptable to me under any terms. I don't care to make a game of being the cow or chicken and seeing how much feed I can get out of the farmer while trying to avoid the privacy slaughterhouse. I probably could win such a game, like you are doing, but then I can definitely get my own feed. I'd rather simply have nothing to do with Facebook, have never once had an account, never visited the site, block their "Like buttons" etc, and I have never once regretted that decision.

Imagine if every user who felt the way you do decided not to use Facebook. It would create demand for a more reasonable social network. Right now starting one would fail because everyone is already on Facebook, and much of the utility of such a site is the number of people you can reach with it. Even a giant like Google is having grave difficulty getting an alternative off the ground, and most startups wouldn't have Google's deep pockets and name recognition.