Archives: Controversies

On May 31, 2008, Canada's federal privacy commissioner launched an investigation into Facebook after four students complained that the popular social media network violated Canadian law by disclosing personal information to advertisers without proper consent. The Canadian law mandates that sensitive information such as a person's address, sexual preference ,birth date and school cannot be disclosed without gaining the individual's express consent. However, on Facebook the users must specifically change their settings to keep that information private.

Facebook search function has been accused of preventing users from searching for certain terms.

In August 2007, a configuration problem on a Facebook server caused the PHP code to be displayed instead of the web page the code should have created, raising concerns about how secure the private data on the site was. In November 2007, Facebook was embroiled in another controversy when it launched Beacon, a system (later discontinued in September 2009), where third-party websites could include a script by Facebook on their sites, and use it to send information about the actions of Facebook users on their site to Facebook, prompting serious privacy concerns.

In February 2004, when thefacebook.com was launched, Aaron Greenspan claimed that Zuckerberg was copying aspects of his work from a web portal called houseSYSTEM which he had launched in August 2003. In an e-mail message, circulated widely to Harvard students on September 19, 2003 Greenspan described the newest feature of houseSYSTEM as "the Face Book", an online system for quickly locating other students. Four months later, Mr. Zuckerberg started his own site originally named "thefacebook.com."

A lawsuit filed by Divya Narendra, Cameron Winklevoss, and Tyler Winklevoss, founders of the social network ConnectU in September 2004 alleged that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had broken an oral contract to build the social-networking site, copied the idea, and used the source code they had provided to create Facebook.

Several government organisations in Ontario, UK and Finland have blocked access to Facebook at the workspace citing security risks, work life balance, potential leaks of sensitive information at the workplace as reasons behind the ban.

In September 2007, Facebook launched two new features called the News Feed and Mini-Feed which allowed users to see a collection of actions made by their Facebook friends. This caused panic among many users alleging that this was an invasion of their privacy. The main concern revolved around non-friends being able to access too much information.

Facebook has been under scrutiny by many schools and university with some banning the site temporarily or permanently due to 'inappropriate use' of the platform by the student community. The University of New Mexico (UNM) and Kent State University are two examples of educational institutions having imposed such bans.

Facebook has been under rising scrutiny and concern over its use as a means of surveillance and data mining. While the network claims to take the issue of privacy seriously, experts have raised concerns over personal content being aggregated for marketing and other purposes.