Violation of Privacy in Facebook

I bet that most of the people do not know that there are privacy laws for social networking sites. Hence, I will discuss about the privacy laws for social networking sites in this post. Privacy laws refer to rule that protects a person's right and administrate storage and release of their detailed personal information (BusinessDictionary.com). Gross and Acquisti (2005) claimed that the consideration of information revealed in a social networking site should inform that person's expectations for privacy of information released in the network.

I am pretty sure that everyone had heard about the privacy problem that Facebook, the largest social networking site is facing these days. Facebook are involved in an accusation by violating Canada's privacy laws. There was 15 groups of people filed complaint about Facebook at Federal Trade Commission and it was forced to take steps to safeguard against security infringes. There is a report stated that Facebook is keeping the personal information of users who have deactivated their accounts in its databases which had violates the privacy laws in Canada (Telegraph). Besides, Facebook also reveals the users' personal information to the advertisers without the permission of users (Jones 2010). Facebook had also provided the information that will create confusion such as its only show the users about the way to deactivate their accounts but not delete it (Telegraph). Facebook told the commissioner that it need to keep personal information for those who shut down their accounts as most of the users reactivate accounts that they had deactivated (Telegraph). According to Facebook, more than 400 millions active users. Below is the statistics of active users on Facebook in Asia and Middle East:

Source: Erictric

The top 10 countries of users on Facebook:

Source: Shiny Shiny

The weekly visits rate of people to Facebook and Google:

Source: AllFacebook.com

According to MacMillan (2010), he states that the recent changes at Facebook are violating user expectations, diminishes user privacy and oppose Facebook's own representation. There are even users that do not know that Facebook have the privacy control button for them to choose what kind of information that its can reveals to others. For instance, when users click on a link, it will pop out a dialog box that requests for reveal their information (Jones 2010). Moreover, most of the people are willing to reveal their personal information to strangers than to those who know them better (Gross and Acquisti 2005). I found a journal that users can understand more about privacy settings in Facebook. Therefore, everyone who are on Facebook, do check out the privacy control to protect your personal information.

References:

Bloomberg.com, "Facebook policies draw criticism by consumer groups (update2)", viewed 8 June 2010, http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-05-06/facebook-policies-draw-criticism-by-consumer-groups-update2-.html.

BusinessDictionary.com, "Privacy law", viewed 8 June 2010, http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/privacy-law.html.

Electronic Frontier Foundation, "Facebook violates privacy promises, leaks user info to advertisers", viewed 8 June 2010, http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/05/facebook-privacy-promises.

Ralph Gross, Alessandro Acquisti 2005, "Information Revelation and Privacy in Online Social Networks", Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.

Telegraph.co.uk, "Facebook 'violates' privacy law", viewed 8 June 2010, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/5846719/Facebook-violates-privacy-law.html.

Vidyarthi 2010, AllFacebook.com, "Facebook Surpasses Google As Number One U.S. Site", viewed 17 June 2010, http://www.allfacebook.com/2010/03/facebook-is-number-one-in-visits-per-week/.