Facebook and Privacy

While researching for a seminar I delivered on consumer privacy I discovered a lot of interesting tidbits on Facebook. I thought I’d publish some of the research I did just to show why we really should be reading those privacy policies.

General Facebook Facts:

Sources – ( http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?timeline and http://www.facebook.com/press/releases.php?p=9166#/press/info.php?statistics )

• Facebook was launched in Feb. 2004
• Facebook now has more than 300 million active users (which makes it bigger than the population of all but 4 countries in the world. Just passed Brazil, next in line is Indonesia and then the US.)
• with more than 2 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each week

Facebook Beacon:

link – http://www.facebook.com/beacon/faq.php

Pitch from Facebook -
“Facebook Beacon is a way for you to bring actions you take online into Facebook. Beacon works by allowing affiliate websites to send stories about actions you take to Facebook.”
(http://www.allfacebook.com/2007/11/breaking-facebook-updates-beacon/)
Facts:

• Launched on Nov. 2007 with 44 partners (src: http://www.facebook.com/press/releases.php?p=9166)
• Partner sites include eBay, Fandango, & Blockbuster
• Originally, if no user action was taken partners could publish information to their Facebook account with updates such as:
• Prompted civil action groups to ask Facebook to change the way Beacon functioned
• As a result Beacon became an opt-in service – users had to explicitly approve any website’s attempts to publish information to Facebook.

Facebook and Canada

links: http://www.pcworld.com/article/171030/thanks_canada_facebooks_4_big_privacy_fixes.html &
http://www.facebook.com/press/releases.php?p=118816

Only two months ago (August 09) a set of recommendations from the Canadian Privacy Commissioner made Facebook change its privacy policy:
“to better describe a number of practices, including the reasons for the collection of date of birth, account memorialization for deceased users, the distinction between account deactivation and deletion, and how its advertising programs work.”

Before these changes went into effect, Facebook users could “delete” their account but it would remain in Facebook’s servers in a deactivated state in case the user wanted to come back and rejoin Facebook. This obviously creates some privacy concerns because an account might contain sensitive information that a user really wants to be erased.

“Increasing the understanding and control a user has over the information accessed by third-party applications. Specifically, Facebook will introduce a new permissions model that will require applications to specify the categories of information they wish to access and obtain express consent from the user before any data is shared”

Even with these changes any third-party application could gain access to most of your profile information through one mouse click:

Many concerns still remain as documented by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC is a public interest research center in Washington, D.C.) at http://epic.org/privacy/facebook/

• Related Posts
• Bookmark
• Tags