Facebook is making the headlines again. This time it’s for their controversial new personal advertising system: FBX. FBX (Facebook Ad Exchange) is a new program where advertisers can exchange your information with Facebook which will allow the site to tailor advertisements to your interests in real time. What is startling about this new system is the amount of information that is being passed about you and me between two big corporations (in this case Facebook and J.Crew).

There are several pros and cons to this program and I’m going to focus on only a few of them. The first and arguably the greatest problem with this new program is Facebook’s number one issue: privacy. While Zuckerberg and the Facebook team are no strangers to privacy issues, this new exchange program brings on a whole new set of problems. It’s scary that even more information about users, for example your phone number, is being passed between two companies.

Initially, this angered me. How could Facebook and other companies trade my information in such a way? However, after this initial spout of anger I began to reason with myself about what this means for advertising. This brings me to my second point. Facebook is a business , one that in the last  eight years has managed to change how we interact with each other– all without charging its users. That’s impressive. And none of this would have been made possible with the thousands of ads targeted at you and me.

While I rarely agree with anything Facebook does, I find that in this case this program deserves a sort of thumbs up. Before the time of personalized ads, my screen was full of ads that had no relevance to me. I was attacked with everything from online college requests to all types of cosmetic surgery. As advertisements go, they were beyond annoying. However, since the introduction of personalized ads, life has been a little better.

If I had to choose between the old way of living with random ads and the new way with ads catered to my interests it would not even be a competition. While ads fall on the overall annoying side of the life spectrum, tailored ads are less annoying because they at least take our interests into consideration.

I’m interested to see how this plays out — especially on the privacy part. I do have high hopes for this program, so long as Facebook can adequately protect themselves against the onslaught of privacy issues that will be sure to come from this.

While a lot of people will continue to have a problem with this, I say that it is time for society to accept the fact that our information will be out there for the world and focus on our energies on better protecting the content that is out there.