Please share your opinion about the following four objectives after reading below.

1. Do people who use Facebook have a legitimate claim to privacy when they themselves are posting

information about themselves?

2. How can using the sharing privacy controls help preserve your privacy on Facebook? In what ways is

the sharing control ineffective?

3. Why would Google combining information from separate accounts across its services and sites have

privacy implications for its users?

4. Look up your address on Google Street View. Do you believe Google Street View constitutes a

breach of privacy? Why or why not?

In a 2010 interview, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, proclaimed that the "age of privacy"

had to come to an end. According to Zuckerberg, social norms had changed and people were no longer

worried about sharing their personal information with friends, friends of friends, or even the entire

Web. This view is in accordance with Facebook's broader goal, which is, according to Zuckerberg, to

make the world a more open and connected place. Supporters of Zuckerberg's viewpoint, including

fellow tech titan Google, believe the 21st century is an age of "information exhibitionism," a new era of

openness and transparency. However, times have changed, and there are growing calls to put new limits

on the personal information that Facebook, and Google, collect and provide to advertisers.

Facebook has a long history of invading the personal privacy of its users. In fact, the very foundation of

Facebook's business model is to sell the personal private information of its users to advertisers. In

essence, Facebook is like any broadcast or cable television service that uses entertainment to attract

large audiences, and then once those audiences are in place, to sell air time to advertisers in 30 to 60

second blocks. Of course, television broadcasters do not have much if any personal information on their

users, and in that sense are much less of a privacy threat. Facebook, with over 2.9 billion users

worldwide, clearly attracts a huge audience.

Although Facebook started out at Harvard and other campuses with a simple privacy policy of not giving

anyone except friends access to your profile, this quickly changed as its founder Mark Zuckerberg

realized the revenue-generating potential of a social networking site open to the public.

In 2007 Facebook introduced the Beacon program, which was designed to broadcast users' activities on

participating websites to their friends. Class-action suits followed. Facebook initially tried to mollify

members by making the program "opt in" but this policy change was discovered to be a sham, as

personal information continued to flow from Facebook to various websites. Facebook finally terminated

the Beacon program in 2009, and paid $9.5 million to settle the class-action suits.

In 2009, undeterred by the Beacon fiasco, Facebook unilaterally decided that it would publish users'

basic personal information on the public Internet, and announced that whatever content users had

contributed belonged to Facebook, and that its ownership of that information never terminated.

However, as with the Beacon program, Facebook's efforts to take permanent control of user

information resulted in users joining online resistance groups and it was ultimately forced to withdraw

this policy as well. The widespread user unrest prompted Facebook to propose a new Facebook

Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, which was approved by 75 percent of its

members, who voted in an online survey. However, the resulting privacy policy was so complicated that

many users preferred the default "share" setting to working through over 170 privacy options.

In 2009, Facebook also introduced the Like button, and in 2010 extended it to thirdparty websites to

alert Facebook users to their friends' browsing and purchases. In 2011, it began publicizing users' "likes"

of various advertisers' products in Sponsored Stories (i.e., advertisements) that included the users'

names and profile pictures without their explicit consent, without paying them, and without giving them

a way to opt out. This resulted in yet another class-action lawsuit, which Facebook settled for $20

MGMT 9060 MIS - Case Study #3 (Facebook and Google Privacy)

million in June 2012. As part of the settlement, Facebook agreed to make it clear to users that

information like their names and profile pictures might be used in Sponsored Stories, and also give users

and parents of minor children greater control over how that personal information is used.

In 2011, Facebook enrolled all Facebook subscribers into its facial recognition program without asking

anyone. When a user uploaded photos, the software recognized the faces, tagged them, and created a

record of that person/photo. Later, users could retrieve all photos containing an image of a specific

friend. Any existing friend could be tagged, and the software suggested the names of friends to tag

when you upload the photos. This too raised the privacy alarm, forcing Facebook to make it easier for

users to opt out. In 2021, Facebook finally terminated the program after years of privacy concerns about

it.

In 2012, Facebook went public, creating more pressure on it to increase revenues and profits to justify

its stock market value. Shortly thereafter, Facebook announced that it was launching a mobile

advertising product that would push ads to the mobile News Feeds of users based on the apps they used

through the Facebook Connect feature, without explicit permission from the user to do so. It also

announced Facebook Exchange (also known as FBX), an advertising platform that allows advertisers to

serve ads to Facebook users based on their browsing activity while not on Facebook.

In 2018 and 2019 Facebook's reputation for invading the personal privacy of its users took a turn for the

worse when it was revealed that it had lost control of personal information on 87 million users to agents

of the Russian government who had been able to use fake accounts and apps to target political ads

designed to sway the 2016 presidential election. The Russian agents used 75,000 fake accounts, and

230,00 bots to send political messages to an estimated 146 million U.S. Facebook users. Facebook also

revealed it had shared personal data with 60 device makers of smartphones and TVs, and to large

advertisers like Nissan Motors. In 2019 a Wall Street Journal investigation found that eleven out of the

top fifty Facebook apps were sharing data they collect with Facebook. Most of these apps involved

health, fitness, and real estate data. In response, the app developers stopped sharing sensitive personal

data with Facebook, and Facebook itself contacted large developers and advertisers and reminded them

Facebook's policy prohibits sharing any sensitive information with Facebook's servers.

It isn't just Facebook that allows app developers to share personal information with online ad platforms

like Google. Facebook announced that this was "industry standard practice." But clearly, Facebook's

ability to effectively monitor and police exactly what information apps and advertisers share with

Facebook's SDK (software development kit) is limited, at best, and at worst, not possible given the scale

of Facebook's platform, which is the most widely used app platform on the Internet with tens of

thousands of app developers and advertisers.

Not to be outdone, Google has also taken liberties with user personal information, with services like

Google Street View taking pictures of neighborhoods, houses and driveways, without consent;

advertisements served using the content of Gmail messages (though Google claims the content is

anonymized), and pervasive tracking cookies following users across the Internet. Echoing Mark

Zuckerberg, Google CEO Eric Schmidt has stated that "true transparency and no anonymity" is the best

policy for Internet users.