Our personal identifying information is something that many of us try our best to protect.\u00a0 It\u2019s a common worry that an employer may \u201cGoogle\u201d a prospective employee and see what is out there about them, making sure that they are a good fit for the company.\u00a0 As the battle for online privacy wages, some companies are making more headlines than others for their approach.\u00a0 For better or for worse, as is often the case these days in relation to any Internet trend, Facebook comes up at the top of the list.<\/p>\n
The private goes public<\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s actually more accurate to say that Facebook is becoming the epitome of just about every internet privacy complaint ever lodged.\u00a0 Their bad reputation began in 2007, when their underlying code was leaked onto the Internet.\u00a0 This was a gold mine for hackers, showing them all of the backdoors they needed to extract all sorts of personal information quickly and quietly.<\/p>\n Once this issue was fixed, in November of the same year, a project called \u201cBeacon\u201d allowed 3rd party websites to embed a small script onto their pages that would automatically send all sorts of user information and statistics to Facebook.\u00a0 Facebook was now places that Facebook users didn\u2019t even know about, creating a very creepy feeling.\u00a0 Astoundingly, this program was allowed to continue for almost two years.<\/p>\n Identity games<\/strong><\/p>\n Facebook makes it amazingly simple for users to make accounts that are in the likeness of someone else, enabling all sorts of easy defamation.\u00a0\u00a0 While this has always been a concern online, Facebook\u2019s construct makes this very easy to do, and very difficult to combat.<\/p>\n In one case, a man who goes by the online handle of \u201cLefty\u201d has documented the lengths that someone decided to go through to impersonate him.\u00a0 The way that Facebook\u2019s privacy settings work makes people like his stalker extremely difficult to stop, as someone with a new account can block you the moment they create it, making it impossible for you to know they exist unless someone tells you.\u00a0 \u201cLefty\u201d went so far as to drive to Facebook\u2019s headquarters to get answers.\u00a0 Facebook\u2019s response amounted to little more than a shrug.<\/p>\n A worrisome alliance<\/strong><\/p>\n That Facebook would use, sell, and allow compromising of a user\u2019s personal information is all bad enough.\u00a0 Worse was that it wasn\u2019t only to other companies that they\u2019ve proved willing to make these deals.\u00a0 Facebook showed that it was just as willing to bow down to governmental requests as it was to other businesses.<\/p>\n Buckling under pressure is one thing. \u00a0Webmasters who face legal action have to confront this question all the time.\u00a0 Facebook, though, has shown almost a gleefullness in willing to fork over to just about whatever government agencies just about whatever information they want.\u00a0 They\u2019ve stated that, all that they require of the requesting agency is a \u201cgood faith belief\u201d that they will use the information obtained in nothing more than an honest pursuit of evildoers.\u00a0 Those of us a bit jaded these days at the notion of any government agency earning such \u201cgood faith\u201d would rightly get a chill at this naivet\u00e9.<\/p>\n It gets worse.\u00a0 Facebook announced in mid-2011 the launch of its own PAC (political action committee) that would allow its corporate employees to donate money to their favored political candidates.\u00a0\u00a0 This is not an unheard of strategy for large software developers or for large web companies; Google and Microsoft both have PAC.\u00a0 But combine this with the above kowtowking, and then add into that the assertions that Facebook as a whole leans to one side of the political aisle, and you have the recipe for one gargantuan mess of corruption that would make Richard Nixon proud.<\/p>\n Anti-social Extremes<\/strong><\/p>\n One more area in which Facebook creates problems for the user concerned with privacy is in their sudden, unpredictable update of entire systems of software.\u00a0 Now, software updates by themselves are normal.\u00a0 Facebook, though, takes it to new anti-social extremes, with wholesale layout and information access makeovers with no forewarning.\u00a0 It\u2019s starting to become commonplace to wake up one day and find your feed looking utterly different than it did before.<\/p>\n On a simple usability scale, this is irritating.\u00a0 On a privacy level, this is nightmarish.\u00a0 Users never seem to have any notion anymore of what information is private and what is public.\u00a0 By all measures, there seems to be more help shared between users than there is between those users and Facebook.\u00a0 It\u2019s an unbelievable bit of callousness, one that has resulted in an amazing phenomenon: there are half a billion Facebook users, and most of them are conscious of the fact that this is a relationship based on mutual disrespect.<\/p>\n Looking forward<\/strong><\/p>\n Privacy giant EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) has begun to lead the charge to the Federal Communications Commission to look into Facebook and their privacy statement as well as their practices.\u00a0 Pardon the obvious pun, but at this point it\u2019s hard to not look at Facebook\u2019s approach to its own user base as, literally, an EPIC failure.<\/p>\n What does this mean for their future?\u00a0 Right now Google+ is starting to siphon off their user base, and it\u2019s likely that both they and other networks will endeavor to do the same.\u00a0 On the other side, Facebook has not yet shown anything beyond the barest of lip service that they have any intention of changing course on any of these approaches.<\/p>\n At the same time, Facebook is still the largest social networking web site in existence, and that momentum means something.\u00a0 Look at, for example, the Occupy movements, or for that matter, any of the major political movements that have sprung up in the last 3 years.\u00a0 It\u2019s a hard sell to try to tell these people to move to a complete different service when they know full well that all of the people that they want to reach are on this one, and time is of the essence.\u00a0 Many of them would like to do so, but have to consider pragmatics as well as values and privacy concerns.<\/p>\n This is a hard one to predict.\u00a0 Unless Facebook changes course, what will most likely determine its future is how well sites like Google+ and other competitors make it easy to jump ship.\u00a0 If they do, all of the things that Facebook is doing to ignore privacy and other concerns just might soon come back to bite them.\u00a0 Bigger empires have fallen before.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Our personal identifying information is something that many of us try our best to protect.\u00a0 It\u2019s a common worry that an employer may \u201cGoogle\u201d a prospective employee and see 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