AIH: ISY1000/ISY100 - Facebook User Privacy and Ethical Concerns

This report provides a detailed analysis of Facebook user privacy, focusing on the vulnerabilities and problems associated with its policies. It begins with an executive summary and table of contents, followed by an introduction that establishes the significance of user privacy in social networking. The report then examines a case study involving the leakage of user information, highlighting the ineffectiveness of Facebook's privacy systems and the implications of data breaches. It explores the responsibilities of Facebook and users, emphasizing the need for robust privacy policies and protective measures. The report also discusses specific privacy issues, such as the unauthorized sharing of user data with third-party applications and the impact on user trust. It concludes with recommendations for improving privacy settings and ensuring the protection of user information, referencing relevant studies and investigations to support its findings. The report aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the challenges and solutions related to Facebook user privacy in the digital age.

Running head: FACEBOOK USER PRIVACY
FACEBOOK USER PRIVACY
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

1FACEBOOK USER PRIVACY
Executive Summary:
Aim of the report is to understand the necessity of user privacy system in social net5working
sites by studying a case related to the problems of leakage of information from world’s
largest social networking site, Facebook. The case study briefly describes about the problems
of the users due the ineffectiveness of the privacy systems of Facebook. User information are
not protected as claimed by the organisation and information is being leaked to third party
application. These concerns recommends that a social networking site must integrate a proper
privacy policy and system to protect user information.

2FACEBOOK USER PRIVACY
Table of Contents
Introduction:...................................................................................................................3
Idea of User Privacy:......................................................................................................3
Initial Problem from the Case Study:.........................................................................4
Problems Regarding Privacy:.....................................................................................5
Responsibilities of Facebook and Users:.......................................................................6
Protective Measures for Privacy Policy:........................................................................7
A Privacy Issue:.............................................................................................................8
Conclusion:....................................................................................................................9
Recommendation:..........................................................................................................9
References:...................................................................................................................11

3FACEBOOK USER PRIVACY
Introduction:
Facebook is world’s largest social networking site. Social networking sites are the
network to build up communication and relationship among the people all around the world
using internet. It is a faster method than face to face communication and provides a larger
area of communication (Brenner & Smith, 2013). Social networks can be classified into
several categories like personal, location, content sharing and other networks (Brenner and
Smith, 2013). This classification depends on the purpose of the network as well as the
information which are being shared by that network. Facebook is a social networking site,
founded by Mark Zuckerberg, which allows users profile creating, photos and videos and
audio uploading, chatting and others. Features involved with Facebook are pages, events,
group and many others (Krasnova, Veltri & Günther, 2012).
The report is associated with the privacy that is associated with social networking
sites, especially with Facebook. A networking site that is associated with sharing user
information is always vulnerable as the information becomes available to everyone. Personal
information which are being shared in the Facebook can easily be downloaded without proper
privacy setting and that can further trouble the owner of the information.
Aim of the report is to study a case related with the vulnerabilities and problems
related with policies of Facebook regarding user privacy. The allegations of Federal Trade
Commission against Facebook’s policies and other problems developing in other parts of the
world due to this are mentioned in the case study.
Idea of User Privacy:
Social networking sites provide the platform to share personal information like data,
photos, videos, audio, status update and others (Acquisti, Brandimarte & Loewenstein, 2015).

4FACEBOOK USER PRIVACY
The information becomes available to all the users or selective users according to the user
privacy policies of the social networking sites. Information can become publicly available.
Sometimes the setting option for information sharing remains public and the information
become visible to all the user of the networking site (Smith et al., 2012). Sometimes the
social networking site does not contain certain privacy option that restricts the entire user to
view some information except the allowed ones. Sometimes interventions of third party
software become the reason for the breach in privacy settings (Young & Quan-Haase, 2013).
Several times it has been seen that social networking sites do not give effective guarantee to
protect the user information accordingly. Electronic tracking through short strings of text has
been proved to be a dangerous medium of tracking information. A study performed by AT&T
labs had showed that information can be gathered by advertisers and other third parties from
the social networking sites from the help of cookies and can use them to build a profile of
user’s life (Tucker, 2014).
Information those are gathered from the social networking sites are used both for legal
and illegal purposes. Third party software developers and business users use the information
to personalize applications like online games and others and to build up a successful
advertise. Their market research becomes easy for them. However, in most of the cases
information are used in illegal ways by cyber criminals and identity thieves.
Initial Problem from the Case Study:
Facebook provides the biggest platform for online social networking and
communication. More than 2 billion people remain active daily in Facebook. Numerous
photos, videos, status updates are posted daily in Facebook. The incident that brought out the
problems as major perspective is the leakage of the photo of Randi Zuckerberg, a former
senior executive and the sister of Mark Zuckerberg. The photo had been posted to friends by
Randi; however it had been downloaded and posted in Twitter. The person, who had been

5FACEBOOK USER PRIVACY
accused primarily for posting was Callie Schweitzer, marketing director of VOX media. This
problem had occurred after 11 days of the release of new privacy control settings by
Facebook. Prior to that, privacy control settings are less secure and lengthy. Users have to
open a different page to open the privacy control setting. New settings had provided the
option in the same page as ‘who can see my stuff’ option. Each post is made customizable
with this option so user does not have any difficulty in securing every post (Wang et al.,
2013). Despite of these measures information had been leaked, which proved the inefficiency
of the privacy control system.
Problems Regarding Privacy:
Data policy of Facebook was not accurate as per their demands. The incident of Randi
Zuckerberg brought out the issues in privacy control systems. Federal Trade Commission is
the government association of United States of America which protect consumer rights and
information. Fundamental mission of this organisation is to investigate the businesses
incorporated with public information and protect the information and also take necessary
protective measures if any illegal activities are found. In the late 2011, the organisation had
filed a suit which had accused Facebook for deceiving the customers and not following their
policies accurately. Many third party applications are associated with Facebook, which are
related to gaming, advertising, online quiz and many more (Gundecha, & Liu, 2012).
According to the data policies of Facebook user information like name, gender, profile
pictures, status updates and others. Being an advertising company, the selling of
advertisements depends on the demographic information gathered by Facebook and
according to its terms and conditions Facebook has the rights to use the information of the
users (Madejski, Johnson & Bellovin, 2012). Apart from that, Facebook had announced that
it will not share the sensitive user information with the advertisers, only the information those
are necessary and expandable will be only be shared with third party applications.

6FACEBOOK USER PRIVACY
Investigation of Federal Trade Commission found that the claims of Facebook of
securing user information are not correct. Much sensitive information had been shared to the
third party application and there had been many complaints against that. Another
investigation had reflected the partnership between Facebook and Datalogix, which was a
credit card purchasing information collecting company (Reynolds, 2015). The investigation
had revealed that the user information of Facebook was getting involved in the advertising
research of Datalogix, without consent or knowledge of the specific user. Additionally, a user
was not provided to clear his or her information from the research of Datalogix from
Facebook. It could only be done from the homepage of Datalogix.
Additional problems had also been arisen with the subsidiaries of Facebook. In
Decmber 2012, one of the acquired applications of Facebook, Instagram had announced that
all the photos, updated in Instagram can be sold to the third parties without any compensation
to the users as per the new privacy notice. Furthermore, the owner had also informed the
metadata associated with the photos like name, gender, email id of the users will also be
subjected to sell and the users disagreeing with the plans are given a few weeks’ notice to
remove their account from Instagram. These policies had created severe discontent among the
users and affected the reputation of Instagram as well as Facebook.
Responsibilities of Facebook and Users:
Leakage of information can be placed under the faults of organisation or the user. The
case study highlights the areas regarding issues in privacy policies. Facebook had owned a
specific privacy policy from the start of the business. It had prepared a privacy system to
protect the user information. Despite of being involved in advertising business, the
organisation had claimed that sensitive user information will not be used to third parties (Xu,
Michael & Chen, 2013). The incident of leaking of photo of Randy Zuckerberg was an

7FACEBOOK USER PRIVACY
example of the faults of Facebook regarding privacy issues. The agenda of a newly
customized and more user-friendly privacy system is not only to enhance the privacy policies
of the company but also to secure the user information more strongly, in a methodical way
(Vitak, 2012). The incident happened just after the customization of the privacy system,
which showed that the system had not been checked properly before launching. Majority of
the reasons regarding privacy issues had lied with Facebook, as the investigations of Federal
Trade Commission had revealed that Facebook was not following the policies. Sensitive
private information like name, age, photos were getting integrated with third party
applications (Reynolds, 2011). As a result, private information of consumers were becoming
vulnerable and easily accessible to cyber criminals (Litt, 2013). The example of Randy
Zuckerberg gives a clear picture to that, though it was not a criminal act.
However, a little part of privacy policy integrates the user as well. Any information
that is too sensitive for a user should not be shared in a social networking site that contains
the access of more than a million users (Tan et al., 2012). Understanding of the privacy
policies is very important for a user as without fully knowing the terms and conditions, a user
cannot blame directly for the faults or leakage of information.
Protective Measures for Privacy Policy:
Privacy policy is one of the major components in the business of a social networking
site. Social networking sites are the primary platform of online communication now-a-days.
Users always tend to find innovative but safe social networking sites, which will provide
them with new innovative options for social networking as well as keep their information
protected from the third parties (Liang et al., 2014). The customization of information sharing
is the new idea of Facebook for customer satisfaction. Reveal of user information to third
party will definitely demoralise the user and he or she will fell that it is risky to use the site

8FACEBOOK USER PRIVACY
further. Therefore, introduction of new policies to protect user privacy is a compulsory matter
for Facebook.
The additional measurements, which are mandatory to improve the privacy settings
for the users should be primarily integrate with the social networking sites. Facebook should
develop an option where privacy can be customized to the specific people those one user
wants and the information should be protected that no other user can download the
information (Nilizadeh et al., 2012). Personal information like photos and videos can be
guarded using different techniques. A new system has been launched by Facebook which is
profile picture guard so that no one can download the profile picture that one has set
(Stutzman, Gross & Acquisti, 2013). This option is innovative but not highly effective as
once a person change the profile picture the guard gets automatically turned off. This feature
should be customized more accurately. Downloading of pictures should be confined among
those who have been shared with. This protective option should be added with videos also.
Another privacy option that should be mentioned here is the tagging information (Wilson,
Gosling & Graham, 2012). Many times it has been seen that users get tagged in different
unknown information. Facebook has the option for removing of tags but the users should get
tagged in the 1st place. Therefore, tagging option needs to be customized in such a way that a
user tag an unknown person.
A Privacy Issue:
A privacy issue had happened with me some time ago which had led me to stop using
Facebook. The issue was very severe to me. At that point anybody was able to download the
profile picture of somebody and the personal information can be easily viewed. My profile
picture had been downloaded by some anonymous user and some of my personal data had
been gathered. After that I had watched that a fake profile had been created using those

9FACEBOOK USER PRIVACY
information and the profile had been used to disturb some other profiles in Facebook. Even
my email id had been leaked so I was getting a good amount of spam mails. This was the
issue for which I have stopped using Facebook as the information were protected very poorly.
Conclusion:
From the above report, it can be concluded that, user privacy is one of the major
concerns of social networking sites. Social networking is an activity based on communication
and sharing information that may be personal or professional. Users of these sites will always
prefer that their information must be confined within their communication group and leakage
of information will result a huge dissatisfaction among the users. Leakage of information
always harm a user and it will definitely affect the reputation and publicity of the social
networking sites. Therefore, a social networking sites must have a good set of privacy policy
and appropriate system or systems integrated with the social networking sites to protect the
information of their users from wrong hands.
Recommendation:
Main objective of recommendation is to protect the confidential information of the
users from falling into wrong hands. To protect the information login approvals must be
protected with efficient authentication process. Facebook has newly launched the ‘two-factor
authentication’ protocol for this matter. This authentication protocol must be backed up
properly so that in no other way any other person can hack into one’s profile. These privacy
systems must be properly maintained. New systems should be launched after checking
properly. The lesson can be learned from the case of Randy Zuckerberg, that in spite of
presence of user privacy system the photos of her had been leaked to Twitter by a person who
was not a part of the sharing group. New options should be innovated by the programmers of
the organisation within a short interval of time so that the old users remain happy and the new

10FACEBOOK USER PRIVACY
users become more attracted towards social networking. The design of the security option can
be more stylish. Demographic information should be protected in a different manner and
under no circumstances should be released to a third party. Third party applications should be
permitted if they agree legally not to use any information.

11FACEBOOK USER PRIVACY
References:
Acquisti, A., Brandimarte, L., & Loewenstein, G. (2015). Privacy and human behavior in the
age of information. Science, 347(6221), 509-514.
Brenner, J., & Smith, A. (2013). 72% of online adults are social networking site
users. Washington, DC: Pew Internet & American Life Project.Braun, M.T., 2013.
Obstacles to social networking website use among older adults. Computers in Human
Behavior, 29(3), pp.673-680.
Gundecha, P., & Liu, H. (2012). Mining social media: a brief introduction. In New Directions
in Informatics, Optimization, Logistics, and Production (pp. 1-17). Informs.
Krasnova, H., Veltri, N. F., & Günther, O. (2012). Self-disclosure and privacy calculus on
social networking sites: The role of culture. Business & Information Systems
Engineering, 4(3), 127-135.
Liang, X., Zhang, K., Shen, X., & Lin, X. (2014). Security and privacy in mobile social
networks: challenges and solutions. IEEE Wireless Communications, 21(1), 33-41.
Litt, E. (2013). Understanding social network site users’ privacy tool use. Computers in
Human Behavior, 29(4), 1649-1656.
Madejski, M., Johnson, M., & Bellovin, S. M. (2012, March). A study of privacy settings
errors in an online social network. In Pervasive Computing and Communications
Workshops (PERCOM Workshops), 2012 IEEE International Conference on(pp. 340-
345). IEEE.
Nilizadeh, S., Jahid, S., Mittal, P., Borisov, N., & Kapadia, A. (2012, December). Cachet: a
decentralized architecture for privacy preserving social networking with caching.