Internet Privacy means exclusive right to personal information sent or shared over the internet. Such personal information can only be viewed by you or other internet users with your consent.
Facebook is a social networking website that allows for interaction among individuals and groups. It is a free social network in the sense that no payment is made upon entry. Therefore one would expect facebook database to be huge. The fact is facebook is one of the largest social networking sites
Facebook also has its own privacy issues to deal with recently. An internet privacy-related post wrote that some Harvard students have begun to organize a protest against the popular networking site, Facebook, over recently introduced news feed feature that allows users to see every detail of their social network, such as who is dating whom, and each item that has been changed in the user’s profile.The news feed feature practically strips a user of his/her privacy as every other user knows about his/her activities on the site. Privacy implies that an individual should have utmost control over who should/should not view his/her activities and social network of friends (NewsTrend.com 2008).
Another privacy issue is Facebook’s new "Beacon" advertising system. Facebook users found their purchases on third party sites were being broadcast to their Facebook friends.This feature of Ad is gross violation of privacy in the sense that every other friend in your network is aware of purchases made on other third-party sites. You might want to keep purchases exclusive to yourself only. However, with the Beacon Ad system, users have only limited options for opting out of the broadcast by clicking on a brief pop-up window at the third-party site (Epic).
References:
- Electronic Privacy Information Center, ‘Facebook privacy’,
- NewsTrend.com 2008, ‘Facebook Apologies for Privacy Issues in News Feed’,
- TechCrunch 2008, ‘Facebook No Longer the Second Largest Social Network’
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