Image [1]

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.

Image Source [2]

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.

Image Source [2]

[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.

---