Instructions
Ethical, Social, and Political Issues in E-Business
Facebook Privacy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjojvQLT7-c
Summary
The business model of Facebook is to collect as much personal information on its users as is technically possible, and socially acceptable, and then to sell that information to advertisers in the form of targeted advertising on Facebook’s website, mobile site, and mobile apps, and on partner websites, who use the information to personalize ads. This video provides some suggestions for how users can gain greater control over their personal information that they have placed on their Facebook pages. L=9:23.
case
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, once proclaimed in an interview 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. Many Facebook features are premised on this position. Supporters of Zuckerberg’s viewpoint believe the 21st century is an age of “information exhibitionism,” a new era of openness and transparency. 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 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, currently with almost 1.8 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. If you use Facebook and want nevertheless to preserve some of your privacy, the video describes some steps you can take.
1. Do people who use Facebook have a legitimate claim to privacy when they themselves are posting information about themselves?
2. How will changing your settings on Facebook help protect your privacy?
3. How can you prevent your Timeline from being indexed by Google or other search engines?
