Annotation 3: Privacy protecting? The inefficient settings and ethical problems

To discuss Facebook’s privacy issue, my annotation 3 will develop into two parts. First, I will talk about the inefficient privacy settings, and then analyze how Facebook makes profit from its users, which leads to the conclusion between technology and ethic.

Nowadays when we need to contact with someone, Facebook is one of the options for most of the people. As one of the biggest OSNs (Online Social Network), Facebook has tied individuals and placed them on to a communicating platform. However, we should also notice the waking conscious of individualism, suggesting that people gradually recognize their privacy. That is to say, we have the right to make life more convenience with Facebook, but we also have the conscious to look after our privacy. To support with this idea, let’s take a look at Facebook’s privacy policy, which is smart enough to follow the world trend. From time to time, Facebook has changed and enlarge its privacy policy up to 5000 words. But the problem is that no one will spend time carefully examining every steps of their privacy settings. Some users complain: “the new policy is bewildering and the new opt-out settings is too time-consuming to figure out and use”(Bilton, 2010).

Research also finds out that up to 36% of information share with default privacy settings, and only 37% matches to users expectation (Liu, Krishnamurthy, Gummadi & Mislove, 2010.) Although some are aware of their privacy, they are not allow to have enough ways to manage and even protect.

To analyze why such a great company can’t figure out efficient ways to protect privacy, let’s look back to the source of this profitable business river. It’s obvious that Facebook is not a charity, and they need to gain money from its users. So how do Facebook profit? According to the article (Johnson 2009), Facebook not only provides precise advertisements to users, but also creates virtual gifts or properties to catch people’s attention. Although Facebook claim that they only offer anonymous personal data to advertising company, one can never certain what would be the next trade between Facebook and advertisements.

Also, we put information on the Internet to share with friends. But do we really want these trivial dates be collected? In the research paper of professor Qi, “we might offer personal information voluntarily to several separated data base. For example, we leave scores in schools and medical records in hospital. But it doesn’t mean we allow others to collect them and further reveal our undiscovered side.” So is it right for Facebook to memorize our behaviors and collect every click we made? The answer might be wrong.

Just like what professor Qi mentions: “Privacy is not a new issue. However, due to the growth of information technology, it appears with different kinds of formation in all levels, which is more severe and urgent to focus on.” Facebook unpacks a gift for people: a new platform for social. But in another aspect it could be poison with a sugar coat, making most of the people vulnerable when they choose to embrace the world naively.

Resources:

1.     Bilton, N. (2010, May 12). Price of Facebook Privacy? Start Clicking. Retrieved November 29,2013, from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/technology/personaltech/13bas ics.html?_r=0 2.     Johnson, B. (2009). How exactly is Facebook making money?. Retrieved November 29,2013, from http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2009/sep/16/facebook-money 3.     Liu, Y., Gummadi, K. P., Krishnamurthy, B., & Mislove, A. (2009). Analyzing Facebook Privacy Setting: User Expectation V.S. Reality. Retrieved November 29,2013, from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2068823 4.     Qi, G. (2011). The ethic issue in information age. Retrieved November 29,2013, from http://www.ncu.edu.tw/~phi/NRAE/newsletter/no5/04.html