But the operative word is “untapped.” A ClickZ News story cites Jupiter Research analyst Kevin Heisler saying something that’s intuitively pretty obvious: social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook are rich in user data that could be really useful for behavioral targeting-based advertising. The proudly proclaim their personal preferences in music, books, film, leisure activities, even religion and politics–all demonstrably useful in serving relevant advertising, and all things they’s happy to share with their select friends, but not necessarily with advertisers. Understandably, publishers of social networking sites, says Heisler, are “staying pure to their original vision” and resisting behaviorally targeted ads.

What about in China? China has its share of social networks. There are dating sites like Baihe or Yeeyoo, microblogging or mini-homepage sites like Tencent’s QZone, 51.com, and Korea’s Cyworld; an untold legion of video sharing sites; campus-focused Facebook-like cites including Zhanzuo and 5Q/Xiaonei (both owned by Oak Pacific Interactive); and professional or business networks like CSDN (China Software Developers Network) and the LinkedInesque Wealink. I’ve doubtless left off more than I’ve included. Right now, informal IM-based networks and the inexplicably huge popularity of BBSs probably eat into the potential membership of social networking sites, but judging by reported subscriber growth, that hasn’t been too horrible of a problem.

And what about the privacy thing in China? You’ll hear all the time about how Chinese Internet users–or, culturally, the Chinese more generally–are less concerned with privacy. You’ve probably already had someone tell you that the Chinese word for privacy itself is a 20th century neologism. And in an online environment where cookie deletion rate is rare–less than 1%, compared to the 10% rates of regular deletion I’ve seen cited for the U.S.–isn’t privacy clearly less of an issue?

My take is that Chinese social networks will not yield behavioral riches any faster than their western counterparts. As much as they want to monetize their large user bases and ample inventory (and I do mean large and ample: 51.com, which last month raised a million second venture round, claims over 60 million registered users growing at 160K users per day!), Chinese social network publishers seem to be just as loath to spoil the user experience, and at least those that are well funded are content to grow users and add services without opening the doors to advertising–for now.

That said, the right kind of advertising–ads over which personal page owners, say, have considerable control, or which generate real (or virtual) revenue for the page owner–might work very well in China indeed. That’s what at least one social network publisher tells me.

Social network sites may be fairly well established, but that’s only part of the equation: Behavioral tracking, alas, is sadly underdeveloped in China at present. None of the big U.S.-based behavioral players is active in China for the time being. And even if the SNSs of China did make all that valuable user data available to Chinese ad tech companies, would those ad tech companies know what to do with it? Probably not, at least not at present. A robust contextual engine–Big G’s AdSense, perhaps–could do the job, at least in part. But building something that could make sense out of the jumble of personal info on a typical user page of a Chinese social network would be no technical cake walk.

Speaking of cake, it’s really incumbent on the online ad agencies to come up with products that can let social networks have their cake and eat it too: products that allow individual users some modicum of control, that serve ads that are genuinely germane and do really leverage pertinent user data, and adequately safeguard privacy.