Facebook Privacy Makes The Cover of Time Magazine

Time Magazine’s May 31 issue will hit newsstands with a cover and feature story dedicated to the “scary” side of Facebook.

The cover art pays homage to the Facebook generation with a mosaic of 1,295 Facebook profile photos, accompanied by a blurb from the feature article: “Facebook …and how it’s redefining privacy. With nearly 500 million users, Facebook is connecting us in new (and scary) ways.”

The feature article by Dan Fletcher delves inside Facebook () and its methodologies for hooking new users and explores the historical events leading up to present-day privacy concerns around Open Graph and instant personalization.

At first glance, the feature story appears less critical than the cover makes it out to be. But Fletcher lends a sharp eye to Facebook’s grand vision and enormous growth, and eventually concludes that Facebook is on the path to become “the Web’s sketchy Big Brother, sucking up our identities into a massive Borg brain to slice, dice and categorize for advertisers.”

Although Time Magazine no longer has the same distribution it once did, the print piece — with its online duplicate — is bound to get traction from a very mainstream audience. Unfortunately for Facebook, it looks like the controversy around its approach to user privacy isn’t going away anytime soon.

Magazines to sell subscriptions via Facebook

GLOBAL – Synapse, a division of Time Inc, is collaborating with e-commerce developer Alvenda to allow Facebook users to buy print magazine subscriptions via Facebook news feeds.

The system, which Alvenda expects to make live in July or August, will also allow Facebook users to expand those blurbs of magazine content that are now common in the news feed into full articles, complete with advertising without leaving the news feed.

Facebook users that share a magazine article link with their friends will have the option of expanding the item into a full article with ads and an option to subscribe.