Lately, US newspaper, The Wall Street Journal founds out that Facebook the most popular networking sites that contains 500 million users have been violating the privacy policy. It was found that application in Facebook was providing users’ information to the third parties without their knowledge (ABC news 2010).
As a youngster, Facebook had been one of the social networks that I’m currently addicted to. Despite all the critics on Facebook regarding their privacy policy issue. Even so, I had prepared the fact that my personal information will be leak out to the marketers, advertisers or databases collector when I agreed to sign up for it. Furthermore, Facebook is a social networking site and by posting our information online, we should have prepared for the consequences.
According to Steel and Fowler (2010), it is proven that at least 10 popular applications in Facebook are spreading the users’ information to the third parties. The information is usually collected by outsider for advertising and selling the user information to database company. In addition, the user activities in the internet can be track easily.
According to Bodoni (2010), Facebook are under inspection by European Union for it’s complaining by user on the privacy rule breaches regarding the personal data issue. With the personal data protection regulations, users can access, change or block their information and this will act as a protection to the privacy of the users. This is because, with the technology, there are many new methods for outsiders to retrieve the data in an undetectable manner.
Furthermore, there is a company known as Beacon advertising service that actually function by providing user’s information to Facebook for third parties usage. Problem arises when the information was still being transmitted to Beacon after users have discard and deleted the application. Next, user activities such as purchasing, posting and evaluation from outsource website for example Fandango.com will be collected by Beacon. Privacy has been breach when Beacon was only created to track the user’s activities for the advertiser but not sharing their private information. It had lead to lose of faith in user and created propaganda with an amount of 50,000 users. As stated by Tricia Bushnell a 7 years users of facebook, “We know we don’t have a right to privacy, but there still should be a certain morality here, a certain level of what is private in our lives” (Story & Stone 2007)”.
Facebook in my opinion are responsible of the user information and they have to avoid the data to be demoralized by the third parties.
References:
ABC news 2010, Facebook admits privacy breach, viewed 12 November 2010, <http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/10/19/3042594.htm>.
Bodoni, S 2010, 'Google, Facebook, Rivals Face Stricter Data-Privacy Rules in EU', Bloomberg, viewed 12 Novermber 2010,
Steel, E, Fowler, GA 2010, 'Facebook in Privacy Breach', The Wall Street Journal, viewed 12 November 2010,
Story, L, Stone, B 2007, ‘Facebook Retreats on Online Tracking’, New York Times, viewed 12 November 2010,
No comments:
Post a Comment