ISY100 Ethical Practice: Facebook Privacy Issues & Solutions

This report examines the critical issue of user privacy on Facebook, a leading social networking platform with over 2 million daily active users. It begins by defining user privacy and its importance in protecting personal and professional information. The report then delves into how Facebook handles user data, including demographic information, photos, and videos, and the privacy controls available to users. It highlights several problems related to user privacy, such as information leakage, deceptive practices regarding data sharing with third parties, and unauthorized data collection. Notorious examples, including incidents involving Randy Zuckerberg and Instagram's data policies, are discussed. Finally, the report offers recommendations for maintaining user privacy on Facebook, emphasizing appropriate privacy settings, customization of information sharing, and restrictions on third-party access to confidential data. This report is contributed by a student and available on Desklib, a platform providing study tools and resources for students.

PRIVACY
IN
FACEBOOK

USER PRIVACY
Concept of user privacy comes from protection of the information of a user. Confidential personal or
professional information of a person may cause harm to him or her if it leaked to outside world.
(Acquisti, Brandimarte & Loewenstein, 2015) The information can be used for either legal
or illegal processes but both will cause harm to the person, more or less. User privacy can be affected
in many ways. Any business should maintain user privacy or consumer privacy for their success and
reputation. Therefore, every business must possess an effective user privacy policy.

Social networking
Techniques of has been advanced along with technological advances. Communication has been much
easier and furcommunicationther with the rise of Internet and social networking websites. Facebook is
one of the biggest social networking websites in the world with over 2 million active people daily.
Through these social networking sites users become able to communicate with each other, share
personal information like photos, videos and other stuffs (Brenner & Smith, 2013).

facebook
One of the world’s biggest social networking site is Facebook. Its founder is Mark Zuckerberg. The
site allows to share information like photos, videos, audios, status updates and others. Different
events, groups, communities are linked with Facebook. Overall the social networking site builds up
communication and relationship among people all around the world.

User privacy in facebook
The social networking site deals with the demographic information of user as well as photos, videos
and other staffs of user. Specific privacy controls are present in the site to customize every post.
Privacy settings for photos, videos, status updates can be customized. Personal details can also be
customized but to use third party application some of the information can be revealed (Gundecha &
Liu, 2012).

Problems in user privacy
Randy Zuckerberg, a former senior Facebook executive, had encountered a serious problem of
information leakage while a photo that she had shared among her friends had been leaked to public
and posted to Twitter. Apparently, it had been seen that Callie Schweitzer, marketing director of VOX
media was the first to tweet the photo. This had showed the inefficiency of the privacy system of
Facebook, since Facebook had launched a new customization in privacy settings.

Problems in user privacy
According to their investigation, Federal Trade Commission had pointed out that Facebook is
deceiving its users by not following their claim of selling information to third party for advertisement,
gaming or other stuffs. According to their claim Facebook is only to share the necessary information
for advertisement, not the confidential one (Litt, 2013). The privacy system of Facebook also facing
severe issues as the information like photos and videos are easily being downloaded by anyone.

Problems in user privacy
Additionally there are many problems for regarding user privacy. An investigation of FTC, at the mid
of 2012, had shown that used data had been shared with Datalogix, a credit card purchasing
information collecting company, without the knowledge or consent of the user (Liang et al.,
2014). Also a subsidiary of Facebook, Instagram had announced the right to sell the photographs and
information of a user without compensation and notified the disagreeing users to remove their account
within weeks.

recommendations
To maintain user privacy an appropriate privacy setting is must for Facebook. Each information
should be customized. Photos and videos cannot get downloaded by any users ecept those who are
tagged with it. No confidential demographic information should be delivered to the third party
application.

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.
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.

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