The Robbery of Privacy

For years now, Facebook has been used as a method of communicating to friends around the world. However, few realize that Facebook is not just a simple social networking site. Facebook has been known to share personal information to companies so that the companies can provide advertising that would suit your preferences. Third-party apps were even allowed access to personal information that the app did not even require. This loose privacy policy may have someone’s personal information falling into the wrong hands. A person could claim to be a company, only for the person to find out later that their identity has been stolen.

            On November 29 2011, Facebook agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it deceived its users into thinking that their personal information on Facebook could be made private, and then proceeded to repeatedly share others personal information and make them private. One of the eight complaints mentioned that when Facebook promised their consumers that the photos and videos in their deactivated accounts were inaccessible, “Facebook, [continued to] [allow] access to the content, even after user had deactivated or deleted their accounts”. This depicts the kind of deceit that Facebook would do simply for the sake of revealing your personal life to companies. In December 2009 Facebook changed their website so that certain aspects of a users profile, that were once private, were opened to the public. Facebook did not warn their users in advance about the update nor did they ask for their approval. The “Friends Only” function, which is meant to inhibit the sharing of information to a limited audience, didn’t prevent third-party applications, that users friends used, from accessing the information.

            Your Facebook password is not very secure either to say the least. Facebook does have a password system to protect your account, as well as a “MD5 hash as authorization, their use of encryption is nonexistent” (24). This means that authorization information is sent in the clear, as well as account passwords, making it extremely effortless to steal someone’s password on a public network. What is worse is that the “My Photos” feature provides absolutely no privacy settings whatsoever. Users have no control of preventing pictures of them from being uploaded. The most a user can do is remove the tags that direct the photo directly to the users account. Also, since the privacy setting is nonexistent for ones photos, anyone with a Facebook account can view the photos of anyone else’s photos, regardless of what the users privacy settings might be.

            Europe has a very different way of approaching the issue on the way internet companies use personal information. Europe’s actions to protect Internet privacy has brought up an interesting question: How do the laws of different countries apply to the Internet, where multinational companies govern our digital lives? In Austria, a 24 year old law student requested his own Facebook file and received “1,200 pages in return, full of personal information.” But what caused a media firestorm was that fact that some the information included were things that “he did not enter himself [such as] his physical whereabouts.”

            In the United States, federal legislations on internet privacy has weakened. Lawmakers are trying to weigh the individuals concern for their privacy and companies concern for not being able to advertise effectively. There are people who require the protection of the law to prevent their information from being shared. These people may be “victims of domestic abuse who don’t walk to be stalked or tracked,… or someone who has weird opinions and could mistakenly end up on a watch list when they don’t deserve it”, said Rebecca Mac Kinnon, a member of the New America Foundation and the author of “Consent of the Networked.”

Works Cited

"Federal Trade Commission Protecting America's Consumers." Facebook Settles FTC Charges That It Deceived Consumers By Failing To Keep Privacy Promises. N.p., 29 Nov. 2011. Web. 29 Nov. 2012. <http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2011/11/privacysettlement.shtm>.

Jones, Harvey, and Jose Hiram Soltren. "Facebook: Threats to Privacy." N.p., 14 Dec. 2005. Web. 29 Nov. 2012. <http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/student-papers/fall05-papers/facebook.pdf>.

Online Privacy Regulation." The New York Times. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Nov. 2012. <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/o/online_privacy_regulation>.