TO COME: An introduction, a section on Google+, and a section on ethical social networking.
Facebook shares their users' personal information with third parties. They use mere Web site design changes as an excuse to revert users' privacy settings to unsafe defaults. Their social platform has huge security holes that allow personal information to be leaked. One such hole made some users' private chats accessible to all of their contacts. Facebook also exposes users to malware and identity theft. [1] They make it easy for application developers to collect personal information. [2] The Wall Street Journal found that these application developers collect this personal information, link it with other information, and sell it to others. [3]
In general, Facebook has always operated on an opt-out basis. In some cases, you can actually disable third-party access to your information. But you must always be on the lookout for new "features" or changes to privacy settings. Facebook always changes the way it collects information, and it catches many people unaware. But it's impossible to opt out of things you don't even know about. Recently, Facebook added a feature they call "tag suggestions". If you have photos on your profile, Facebook can pick out people's faces and suggest names for them. This may sound useful, but it's the tip of an almost nightmarish ethics iceberg in information systems. Facebook uses facial recognition software to make this work; they scan already-tagged photos and record distinguishing facial features and then find photos with similar faces and give them names. They maintain a database of people's facial features. They never notified anyone about this database. They never asked users if they could record this information. Instead, of course, they made it an opt-out feature; you have to explicitly disable this hidden feature to keep your facial information out of the database. This new feature has even sparked an investigation by the European Union. [4][5] But just imagine what Facebook could do with this information (and consider their track record with personal information). I suspect they may soon start selling facial data to other companies, law enforcement agencies, and oppressive governments (I've heard that the U.K. once used video camera footage to locate and arrest protesters, so imagine what they could do with facial data).
Basically, Facebook is a business. And you are not their customer. You are their product. They are, in fact, selling their products to advertisers. That is, they use a person's face (without getting permission and without paying anything) to advertise things to that person's friends. Claim to like something, and you've given a product endorsement at a price advertising agencies would love. [6]
And they also seem to like selling out their users to governments and limiting what their users can read and say. After their recent collaboration with Chinese partners, the Facebook platform was allowed into China under political censorship. At the time, Facebook lobbyist Adam Conner remarked, "we're allowing too much, maybe, free speech". [7][8] The Associated Press reported last month that Facebook sold out hundreds of peaceful pro-Palestinian activists who had been organizing events through the social platform. Facebook allowed governments to track its users' activities. As a result, more than 300 peaceful activists were added to airline terrorism watch lists and denied the right to leave their countries. International air travel was disrupted as planes from Geneva and Italy were diverted for security inspections. 310 people were detained after landing in Israel on their way to stand with Palestinians in a peaceful mission of solidarity and fact-finding. [9][10] Imagine what might have happened if Facebook (and widespread publicly-accessible computer networks for that matter) existed during the civil rights movement. Would there be racial equality in the United States today? Or would peaceful protesters organizing events have been sold out and arrested before they could even meet?
But it seems you don't even have to use Facebook to get tracked by Facebook. Everyone who sees a "Like" button somewhere on the Web (as I'm sure you have) can be tracked. Facebook has the ability to map out the browsing behavior of a massive number (a number that grows by tens of millions each month) of Web users, even those who don't use Facebook. [11] Again, imagine what they could do with such vast amounts of information.
Things like these gaping holes in privacy, devious information collection practices, abuse of users, censorship, and tracking inspired Matt Lee, campaigns manager, and John Sullivan, executive director, of the Free Software Foundation to write about Facebook's poor track record with privacy and create rather amusing "Dislike" and "not f'd" buttons. [12]