Since its creation at Harvard University in 2004, facebook has exploded upon the population of internet users and is now the world’s most used social networking site. There are many uses to this site and obviously it has become very popular. On the flip side there are several concerns regarding privacy that I believe haven’t been fully addressed.
First are the mini-feed and news-feed features. The news feed appears on a user’s home page and gives you information on your friends’ activities and updates. You can control some of what appears on others peoples’ news feed but in my experience it is difficult to fully control what other people can see about you, and once a “story” is up on someone else’s news feed you cannot delete it, or even necessarily know it’s there. The mini-feed appears on every users profile page and displays that user’s activities. However that user has the option of deleting any activity reports that they choose. Because of these features it can be quite easy for anyone who is your “friend” to follow all your online activities and communications. As I said it is possible to control much of what other users can see but it requires a certain vigilance that most users either don’t possess or don’t care to employ. In my opinion these features are part of what makes facebook so popular, but also somewhat dangerous.
On December 15, 2005 two MIT students downloaded over 70,000 facebook profiles as part of a research project. They proved that it was possible to access users’ personal information through the use of malicious applications. These students did not do this with the intent to harm or violate anyone, but it raised many concerns over just how secure the site is.
“Beacon” has also caused some controversy. Beacon allows partner sites to advertise to specific users based on information they had collected about users from outside sources. These directed advertisements could even appear as events posted to a users news feed. This also allowed these partner sites to post information from outside of facebook to users’ friends’ news feeds. Very soon after its inception and subsequent backlash from the online community, facebook changed the program so that each outside site or “application” has to ask permission from each user to publish information they gather about that user. Still, this is not a perfect system because once you accept an application’s terms it will continue to publish information about you to your friends until you delete the application. Many people add applications over time and then forget about them.
Another issue with facebook is that it is very difficult to fully delete your profile. It’s quite easy to make your profile inactive and inaccessible to other facebook users. These inactive profiles can easily be reactivated though, with only knowledge of the email address and password. In order to fully delete your profile you must contact facebook directly.
Facebook is so big that it has become an unavoidable presence in our society. Even if you are not on facebook you probably have several friends that are on facebook and their profile probably have pictures of you posted and there’s not much anyone can do about it. The issue of privacy is a legitimate concern but I fear there is no way to undo what already exists. Facebook certainly does have its advantages which I believe outweigh the loss of privacy that most of us have already undergone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_features#News_Feed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Beacon
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