The following chapter looks into the privacy issues of social networking services.[18] In June 2011 Facebook enabled an automatic facial recognition feature called "Tag Suggestions". The feature compares newly uploaded photographs to those of the uploader's Facebook friends, in order to suggest photo tags. Facebook has defended the feature, saying users can disable it. European Union data-protection regulators said they would investigate the feature to see if it violated privacy rules. [19]

Chunka Mui wrote in Forbes that Facebook has essentially become a worldwide photo identification database. Paired with related research, we're looking at the prospect where good, bad and ugly actors will be able identify a face in a crowd and know sensitive personal information about that person. These developments mean that we no longer have to worry just about what Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and other social sites do with our data; we have to worry about what they enable others to do, too. And it now seems that others will be able to do a lot. [20]

When Consumer Reports released its annual report on Internet privacy and security they placed Facebook front and center. The "State of the Net" research and statistics from Consumer Reports suggest that there is an overall increase in certain digital problems -- such as ID thefts, phishing schemes, and security breaches -- in the past year, while issues related malware and unauthorized credit charges are occurring neither more nor less frequently than in the prior 12 months.[16]

It notes that "For users that have not opted out, Instant Personalization is instant data leakage. As soon as you visit the sites in the pilot program (Yelp, Pandora, and Microsoft Docs) the sites can access your name, your picture, your gender, your current location, your list of friends, all the Pages you have Liked -- everything Facebook classifies as public information. Even if you opt out of Instant Personalization, there's still data leakage if your friends use Instant Personalization websites -- their activities can give away information about you, unless you block those applications individually."Instead of replacing old information with new materials, online journals are archive-oriented compilations of entries that can be searched.While American adults are concerned about how the government and corporations are centrally collecting data about citizens and consumers, teenagers are freely giving up personal and private information in online journals.The most startling findings however, involve how much Facebook knows about its nearly 900 million members, and how much we freely offer -- information mined by employers, insurers, the IRS, divorce lawyers, as well as identity thieves and other criminals.Social Networking sites as mentioned earlier are the sites aimed for micro-blogging, to document about ones life, his/hers likings and dislikings and everyday happenings.[14]

Social networking sites (such as Facebook, Orkut) create a central repository of personal information.These archives are persistent and cumulative.Herein lies the privacy paradox.