Facebook: privacy issues

A social Network is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interactions and the construction of words, pictures, video and audio. Facebook (FB) is a social networking website that is owned and operated privately by FB Inc. It’s supposed that FB links people through social networks at schools. In its early version it was a way for student to connect with people they know, go to school with, share interests with, etc.
FB was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and 3 of his colleagues while they were students at Harvard University. Website membership was initially limited to Harvard students; later expanded further to include any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. The website currently has more than 250 million active users worldwide; 120 million users log on to FB at least once each day and more the third of users are outside colleges. 12 millions of Canadian use FB


Privacy
Internet Designers try to make user friendly applications; though, they invented what they called “Default Settings”. Each time when you sign up for a new membership you’ll see this feature. When you sign up as a user of FB, and you use default settings this means you allow all other FB users to find you in searches.

FB’s information philosophy — and default settings — is to share almost everything that you’ve included in your FB account. That means if you’ve never changed your privacy settings, your FB profile is shared with not only all your friends and groups, but also with everyone in every network you join. That’s a lot of sharing. And, according to the FB users’ agreement policy: entered information is belonging to FB.
Meanwhile, FB provides their users with an arsenal of privacy control and settings.
You should control over:
• Information you share in your profile
• Information people see when they search for you
• Information on actions you take with other people
• Information available to others when you contact them
• Privacy controls for applications you’ve added to your account
Search settings: By default, everyone can find our profile listing in a public search. This includes users on FB, and potentially people searching on Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
If you insist to keep yourself searchable, you should strictly limit the information you’re leaving on that public listing. More, it’s highly recommend, that you don’t “go public”.
Profile settings: Here’s where you have control over the contact information you provide to other people. If you’re in one or more of FB’s Networks, you have the option of either displaying your contact information to only your friends, or to everyone. Again, we recommend that you limit sharing information to only friends and you should specify that “no one” can see your e-mail and contact information.
Therefore, there is several privacy concerns related to FB. One the first was the Beacon initiative. Lunched in 2007 as marketing product, this feature allowed websites to publish a user's activities to their FB profile as "Social Ads" and promote products. FB’s users had to decide whether they want or not to exclude companies from getting their profiles “opt-out”. FB decided to adopt an “opt-in” politics which mean users should subscribe to this service with companies.
Other issue was raised regarding the use of FB as a means of surveillance and data mining. Two MIT students were able to download over 70,000 FB profiles from four schools using an automated shell script, as part of a research project on FB privacy published on December 14, 2005.
Problems have also been reported regarding the difficulty of deleting user accounts. Previously, FB only allowed users to "deactivate" their accounts so that their profile was no longer visible. However, any information the user had entered into the website and on their profile remained on the website's servers. This outraged many users who wished to remove their accounts permanently. FB changed its account deletion policies on February 29, 2008, allowing users to contact the website to request that their accounts be permanently deleted. In July 2009 it came to light that there are concerns by the Canadian Privacy Commission that FB is not respecting several Canadian privacy laws by not deleting a user's information when their account is deactivated and by giving "confusing or incomplete" information to subscribers. FB’s Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly was quoted as saying that FB was working with the commission to resolve the issues. The CPC have given FB 30 days before they make a further review and recommendations. If FB don't comply with the Canadian statutes it's possible that the issue could be taken to the federal courts.