Summary:
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.
Allegations:
- Two students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) were able to use an automated script to download publicly posted information over 70,000 Facebook profiles as a part of a research project on Facebook privacy published on December 24, 2005.
- In September 2007, Facebook added a public-facing search function leading to anger and criticisms. Technology writer Om Malik commented on his blog GigaOm, "This move transforms Facebook from being a social network to being a quasi-White pages of the web." Concerns were raised over personal content being aggregated for marketing and other purposes.
- BBC's 'Watchdog' programme in October 2007 demonstrated how Facebook was an easy way to collect an individual's personal information in order to facilitate identity theft.
Defence:
- In response to the MIT findings, Facebook strengthened security protection for its users saying, "We've built numerous defences to combat phishing and malware, including complex automated systems that work behind the scenes to detect and flag Facebook accounts that are likely to be compromised (based on anomalous activity like lots of messages sent in a short period of time, or messages with links that are known to be bad)."
- Facebook's second clause which was gave the platform the right to sell users data to private companies was defended by (former) spokesman Chris Hughes, who said, "Simply put, we have never provided our users' information to third party companies, nor do we intend to."Facebook eventually removed this clause from its privacy policy.
- Facebook's data policy refutes the claim that a users personal information can be easily accessed. The site claims that there is barely any personal information presented to non-friends - if users leave the privacy controls on their default settings, the only personal information visible to a non-friend is the user's name, gender, profile picture, networks, and user name.