With
the waking conscious of individualism, people nowadays don’t just enjoy the
convenience Facebook bring, but also gradually recognize their privacy. That is
to say, we have the right to make life more convenient 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 enlarged its
privacy policy up to 5000 words. But the problem is that no one will spend time
carefully examining every step 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 allowed to have enough
ways to manage or 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 iis 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
claims that they only offer anonymous personal data to advertising company,
no one can be certain what would be the next trade between Facebook and
advertisements.
Also,
as we put information on the Internet to share with friends, 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 that 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 make? The answer is definitely 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:
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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
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