Is Internet privacy dead? No, just more complicated: researchers

Social networking online is a growing phenomenon in the technology era as a communication tool for community building and social change. However, such progress in the online phenomenon leads to the invasion of online privacy of users. By far, Facebook is one of the most popular social networking site with numbers of applications, games and so forth which appeals to the youths who are not aware of the personal details been exploited.

Source: Facebook

As such, personal information is being obtained by few ways such as adjusting the privacy settings to the strongest leads to exposure of the information more widely compared to others who have set it lower privacy settings (Shiels 2008). Another issue would be allowing attractive application such as games, news and others offered by Facebook leads to ease of access by the application developer to the personal’s information. On the other hand, Facebook promotes itself as a communication tool to connect people but it did not informed people that Facebook is involved in commercial activities such as targeted advertising (Venezia 2010). Such crucial information is not being informed to users before they signed up for an account. Facebook uses a new ad system which helps to target relevant advertisement with the user’s personal information. Therefore, user’s action in using the Facebook service are monitored such as a user does not want to publish the information for the friend to view but Facebook still obtains it (Malik 2007). Thus, Facebook is able to place more focused advertisements to individuals depending on the likes and dislikes.

However, to curb such issues in privacy information, Silicon Valley introduced a new tool where users have stronger control over their privacy which this provides assurances of their information will not be leaked (Shiels 2008). Unfortunately, users who used Facebook personal information will still be leak out even though with any new privacy protection is provided. It is most important that the Facebook developer should respect users’ privacy and distributing their information to their advertising partners for money.

References:

Venezia P, 2010, How I learned to stop worrying about privacy and love Facebook, viewed 14 June 2010, http://www.infoworld.com/t/privacy/how-i-learned-stop-worrying-about-privacy-and-love-facebook-079?page=0,1.

Malik O, 2007, Is Facebook Beacon a Privacy Nightmare?, viewed 14 June 2010, http://gigaom.com/2007/11/06/facebook-beacon-privacy-issues/.

Sheils M, 2008, Facebook ‘violates privacy laws’, viewed 14 June 2010, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7428833.stm.