3pm Journal of Digital research & publishing - artichoke web design

3pm Journal of Digital research & publishing
accepted News Feed as one of the most popular features of Facebook. Whenever they log
onto Facebook, the News Feed is the first thing to see. However, even if users can make
controls on the exposure of information, it is still hard to protect their privacy. This is
because users tend to use the default privacy setting, which aims to make information
sharing to a maximum extent.
Issue from “Beacon”
In November 2007, Facebook launched “Beacon”, an online advertising system, which can
track users’ personal actions on 44 partner websites. Information including purchases
decisions and games played are broadcast on News Feed without users’ permissions.
What’s worse, even if users have logged off from Facebook, their information still can
be broadcast. Although there are specific privacy settings on this feature, the problem
is that even if users can choose whether or not to public their actions on third-parties
sites, Facebook still can track the data regardless of the privacy settings. This sparked
an extensive protest. An anti-Beacon group MoveOn.org’s accused Facebook that Beacon
advertising system violates users’ privacy. The spokesman Adam Green (2007) advocates
that “it‘s time for Facebook to reverse this massive privacy breach.” In response, Facebook
made some changes, but that still could not satisfy with users. Finally, the Beacon service
was stopped because of the privacy issue.
Issue from “Third Party”
Third parties on Facebook can access most users’ personal information. Facebook allows
third party advertisers to use users’ posted photos without their permissions, and it neither
supervise nor support “Platform Developers”. What is worse, they even cannot control how
these “Platform Developers” deal with all users’ information they have obtained. All of
these actions of Facebook can be considered as the intentional and illegal use of someone
else’s property for one’s own use or some other unauthorized purpose (Los Angeles Times,
2009). The third parties can use Facebook for data tracking, commerical exploitation and
other malicious purposes, which bring numerous inconveniences to users. Besides, there
is even a link between Facebook and government agencies. For instance, the Patriot Act
(2006) permits state agencies to disregard the privacy setting on Facebook to look for
potential staff.
Issue from complex privacy policy
Facebook has its own privacy policy, which has grown significantly over time. According to
Pan and Zinkhan (2006), privacy policy can be categorized into two types, comprehensive
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