Privacy in Facebook

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As we witnessed, Facebook has been hit with a string of controversies over privacy. After a series of complaints from some users and privacy advocates, the company made wholesale changes to its privacy settings. Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, apologized to users, saying that some of the site’s privacy settings had become too complicated for the average user to understand. But they are putting as best as they can do for the mutual benefit.

The internet is a free for all between the good guys and the bad guys with ordinary people caught in between. Facebook is no different. The best we can do to protect our privacy, is avoid putting the personal data in any of the social networking site and protect each other as best as we can.

Although Facebook provide us with privacy settings, such that we can configure our account to only allow our friends to view our posts, I don’t think it’s sufficient to guarantee that your data only visible by people whom you want to. Well, it can never be foolproof when we’re talking about the internet. Many ways for people to gather information about us in this social networking world. If we really want a privacy, we should stay away from all the social networking sites. After all Facebook is one of free social networking site, If not Facebook, some other online social networking tool ( Instagram, Twitter, My space, Linkedin) is going to expose us. Facebook is trying it's best to provide us the better control over our Privacy with the ever evolving privacy policies and settings.

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[2] Bottomline is as Steve Rambam, a private investigator specializing in Internet privacy cases, says, "Privacy is dead – get over it". "Appeal of online services is to broadcast personal information on purpose."

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Facebook was officially launched on Feb 4, 2004 as a private space for communication with a group of your choice, over the years it has attained a tremendous growth in users and business partners and transformed into a platform where much of your information is public by default.

Today, it has become a platform where you have no choice but to make certain information public, and this public information may be shared by Facebook with its partner websites and used to target ads.

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To help illustrate Facebook's shift away from privacy, some excerpts from Facebook's privacy policies over the years. As the users network grows the privacy concerns and privacy policy also gets growing.

Viewed together, the successive policies tell a clear story. Facebook originally earned its core base of users by offering them simple and powerful controls over their personal information. As the Facebook’s business partners network increases, the more and more of Face book’s users' information is shared and privacy issues and subsequent policies revisions are inevitable.

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[1] Lawsuits against the Facebook’s privacy concerns are also increasing trend. Recently Austrian student Max Schrems has launched a class action lawsuit against Facebook, claiming that Facebook's monitoring of a user's activity is in violation of European Union laws. More boldly, he claims Facebook cooperates with the U.S. surveillance scheme Prism. The case will request $667 in damages for the first 25,000 members of the class. Thus far, 25,000 Facebook users have signed up as participants to this class. When hese kind of lawsuits against privacy concerns piled up as a force, Facebook will revise their privacy policy and provide additional options for its users to limit their publically available data.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg once said "When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was 'why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?' And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people.

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Let’s see some of the interesting Facebook’s privacy related survey's outcome in an infographics way. Info-graphics is a familiar way of visually representing the complex interconnected information, data or knowledge quickly and clearly to everyone. Source for all below mentioned figures from (website). Since all the data’s are from unauthorized source, there could be discrepancy with the actual figures. Since this post is all about discussion on privacy, all the figures explained in the infographics are supported with reasonable assertion.

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-  61 % of users have said they don’t trust Facebook, after all it is a social networking where we may get a chance to know about many unknown persons. Since Facebook is social networking site obviously the trust is on low side.
-  68 % of the users don’t seems to understand the privacy settings. Due complexity and size of the “Privacy policy agreement”, Most of the users don’t have time (or) not spending time to go through all of it.
-  28% of the users only have expressed that Privacy in Facebook is importance. This is the base idea behind Facebook’s creation, Facebook is a social networking site, and those who wants to connect with friends and intended to make new friends all across world are not much concerned about privacy.
-  28% of users shall all their posts with more than just friends. Facebook users are keen to express their views and comments of social and personal issues in an open post and let the world know who they are.
-  91% of the employees are hired after their social media page is screened and Facebook holds a high percentage share of 65% than linkedin 63% in this screening practice.

All the above said figures may not be 100% accurate, but this is the general trend and all it says is majority of the users are taking Facebook as social media platform and not expecting much on their privacy.

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