About Facebook

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/010608F.shtml

When one of America's largest electronic surveillance systems was launched in Palo Alto a year ago, it sparked an immediate national uproar. The new system tracked roughly 9 million Americans, broadcasting their photographs and personal information on the Internet; 700,000 web-savvy young people organized online protests in just days. Time declared it "Gen Y's first official revolution," while a Nation blogger lauded students for taking privacy activism to "a mass scale." Yet today, the activism has waned, and the surveillance continues largely unabated.

Generation Y's "revolution" failed partly because young people were getting what they signed up for. All the protesters were members of Facebook, a popular social networking site, which had designed a sweeping "news feed" program to disseminate personal information that users post on their web profiles. Suddenly everything people posted, from photos to their relationship status, was sent to hundreds of other users in a feed of time-stamped updates. People complained that the new system violated their privacy. Facebook argued that it was merely distributing information users had already revealed. The battle - and Facebook's growing market dominance in the past year - show how social networking sites are rupturing the traditional conception of privacy and priming a new generation for complacency in a surveillance society. Users can complain, but the information keeps flowing.

Facebook users did not recognize how vulnerable their information was within the site's architecture. The initial protests drew an impressive 8 percent of users, but they quickly subsided after Facebook provided more privacy options. Today the feed is the site's nerve center. Chris Kelly, Facebook's chief privacy officer, said that when he speaks on campuses these days, students approach him to say that while they initially "hated" the feed, now they "can't live without it."

Still, Facebook hit a similar privacy snag in November after it launched Beacon, a "social advertising" program that broadcast users' profile pictures and private activities as advertising bulletins. When a Facebook user bought a product on one of dozens of other websites, for example, the information was sent to Facebook and distributed across the user's network as a "personal" ad. ("Joe Johnson rented Traffic at Blockbuster," for example.) Many users had their pictures and actions morphed into advertisements without their consent, turning private commerce into public endorsements. That could be an illegal appropriation, according to Daniel Solove and William McGeveran, two law professors who specialize in digital privacy and who blogged about the issue.

MORE at link above --

[riverdeep]

1. Basic stuff,

if you don't want information about you getting on the internet, don't offer it up. Once it's out there, there's no taking it back, and you're under the mercy of privacy clauses the website may or may not follow in the future. It's that simple.