Lakhasly

The following chapter looks into the privacy issues of social networking services. 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.

Susan B. Barnes a Professor in the Department of Communication at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York claims that in America, people live in a paradoxical world of privacy. As we know people will freely give up personal information to join social networks on the Internet and social networking tools have almost become indispensable for them.
For example, teenagers reveal their intimate thoughts and behaviors online and, on the other hand, government agencies and marketers are collecting personal data about us. /…/ Many people may not be aware of the fact that their privacy has already been jeopardized and they are not taking steps to protect their personal information from being used by others. [14]

Social networking sites (such as Facebook, Orkut) create a central repository of personal information. These archives are persistent and cumulative. 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. Herein lies the privacy paradox. Adults are concerned about invasion of privacy, while teens freely give up personal information. This occurs because often teens are not aware of the public nature of the Internet. [14]

Facebook has met criticism on a range of issues, including online privacy, child safety and hate speech. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has identified two personal information aggregation techniques called "connections" and "instant personalization" that assure anyone has access even to personal information you may not have intended to be public. [15]
You create a "Connection" to most of the things that you click a "Like button" for, and Facebook will treat those relationships as public information. If you Like a Page on Facebook, that creates a public connection. If you Like a movie or restaurant on a non-Facebook website (and if that site is using Facebook's OpenGraph system), that creates a public connection to either the applicable Page on Facebook or the affiliated website. [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." [16]

There has been many more privacy issues with Facebook. For example, in August 2007, the code used to generate Facebook's home and search page as visitors browse the site was accidentally made public, according to leading Internet news sites. [17] In November 2009, Facebook launched Beacon, a system where third-party websites could include a script by Facebook on their sites, and use it to send information about the actions of Facebook users on their site to Facebook, prompting serious privacy concerns. [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. 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. [21]

While U.S. legislators speak out against employers requesting Facebook passwords from employees, the following information — much of it sensitive and potentially damaging — doesn't require special access to uncover: 4.7 million “liked” a Facebook page about health conditions or treatments (details an insurer might use against you); 4.8 million have used Facebook to say where they planned to go on a certain day (a potential tip-off for burglars); 20.4 million included their birth date, which can be used by identity thieves; 39.3 million identified family members in their profile; 900K discussed finances on their wall; 1.6 million liked a page pertaining to racial or ethnic affiliations; 2.3 million liked a page regarding sexual orientation; 7.7 million liked a page pertaining to a religious affiliation; 2.6 million discussed their recreational use of alcohol on their wall; 4.6 million discussed their love life on their wall. [21]