In recent news, The Wall Street Journal reveals that the most-used social networking, Facebook, violates privacy policy. The newspaper stated that it found out that the applications in Facebook turns out to provide the users' names and in some cases, the users' friends' names to companies that build detailed databases on people in order to track them online (ABC News 2010).
Facebook is the most current social networking that was used by hundreds of millions of people all around the world. I have a Facebook account myself. Mostly, I used it to keep track of current events, friends birthdays, playing games as well as uploading photos. One thing I do realize that in Facebook, most people provide their personal information on the profile page. This way, their peers will know how to contact them, what are their preferences, and many more. However, recent issues regarding privacy breach has made changes in Facebook on how their users privacy can be protected.
Facebook is known for its third party applications that are accessible by its users. Most apps aren't made by Facebook, but by independent software developers. According to Steel & Fowler (2010), several apps became unavailable to Facebook users after the Journal informed Facebook that the apps were transmitting personal information; the specific reason for their unavailability remains unclear. The information being transmitted is one of Facebook's basic building blocks, the unique "Facebook ID" number assigned to every user on the site. Since a Facebook user ID is a public part of any Facebook profile, anyone can use an ID number to look up a person's name, using a standard Web browser, even if that person has set all of his or her Facebook information to be private. For other users, the Facebook ID reveals information they have set to share with "everyone," including age, residence, occupation and photos.
In responding to this issue, Facebook has then created a control panel that lets users see which apps are accessing which categories of information about them. It indicates, for example, when an application accesses a user's "basic information" (including a user ID and name). However, it doesn't detail what information friends' applications have accessed about a user. Also, Facebook has been reported disabling thousands of applications that violates its policies.
References:
- ABC news 2010, Facebook admits privacy breach, viewed 12 November 2010, <http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/10/19/3042594.htm>.
- Steel, Emily & Fowler, Geoffrey A. 2010 'Facebook in Online Privacy Breach', The Wall Street Journal, viewed 12 November 2010, <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304772804575558484075236968.html>
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