Question

With reference reference to our Session 2 Case Study (Facebook and Google) respond to the following question:

1. Do people who use Facebook have a legitimate claim to privacy when they themselves are posting information about themselves? Explain your position.

2. What ethical, social, and political issues exist? Briefly explain your response.

CASE 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.

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 1.71 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 Web sites 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 Web sites. 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 third-party
Web sites 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 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 uploads photos, the software recognizes the faces,
tags them, and creates a record of that person/photo. Later, users can retrieve all photos
containing an image of a specific friend. Any existing friend can be tagged, and the software
suggests 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. But concerns remain.
In May 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 new mobile advertising product that will push ads to the mobile news feeds of
users based on the apps they use through the Facebook Connect feature, without explicit
permission from the user to do so. Facebook reportedly may also decide to track what
people do on their apps. It also announced Facebook Exchange, a new program that will
allow advertisers to serve ads to Facebook users based on their browsing activity while not
on Facebook.
In 2013 and 2014, Facebook actions continued to raise alarms about privacy, with a CNBC
survey finding that Facebook is the technology company that consumers fear most when
it comes to privacy. Although Facebook continues to come under scrutiny from the Federal
Trade Commission and privacy watchdog groups, Facebook’s stock price has climbed
steadily from 2013 to 2016, and it’s unlikely the company will stop pushing the envelope
anytime soon.
Not to be outdone, Google has also taken liberties with user information, with services like
Google Street View taking pictures of your neighborhood without consent, advertisements
served using the content of your messages (though Google claims the content is
anonymized), and pervasive tracking cookies following you 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.

Answer 1

1. Do people who use Facebook have a legitimate claim to privacy when they themselves are posting information about themselves? Explain your position.

Yes, people do have a legitimate claim to privacy even if they are posting information about themselves because the users of Facebook are sharing information to a circle of people who are associated with them as friends and followers and are sharing under the impression that this data will only be limited to the Facebook and no other place.

Facebook is known for its behaviour of extracting private information from its users profile and selling it for different purposes. The recent story of data leak where the data leak which happened at Facebook, The data was sold to a company known as Cambridge Analytica which in turn manipulated voters to support a particular contestant during elections.

Every user who is using Facebook is not a law graduate and does not understand the complexity of privacy law but he surely understands that the data he is sharing should only be limited to Facebook and it should not be used to manipulate him.

It is my firm belief that we share our information to any social media website under this impression that this data will only be stored at the servers of this company and will be deleted once I will delete it from my end, it is the right of individuals to have privacy and just by using a social media website we as a citizen have not forgot to exercise that right.

2. What ethical, social, and political issues exist? Briefly explain your response.

The issues which exist are:

Ethical: It is the belief of the social media companies that they can sell users personal data stating that the data does not have a name and anonymity is secured but we all know finding out who is behind the numbers allotted to individuals in the name of anonymity is not a very tough task.

The companies such as Facebook and Google should understand that sharing people's data and taking their right to privacy from them for profits is unethical and such activities would not bgo for long even if this era is termed as “information exhibitionism".

Social: It is the society at large whose privacy is being ripped apart and people from the society are being manipulated based on the data they have shared. The society has become vigilant and is not easily going to accept the terms and conditions these companies put forward. The issue of privacy is a social issue and it affects everyone living in it. In my view the society would not take such activities for long and the sustainability of these very social media giants will come under question.

Political: The manipulation of people during American presidential election which was recently exposed was based on the data which was taken from a social media company, this issue was highly politicised and many counties of the world were affected from it. Mark Zukerberg the CEO of Facebook was summoned and asked why such thing even happened. The importance of data can be understood by the fact that with the help of sophisticated software and programmes the companies can profile individuals and make a personality chart of them which can later be used to manipulate them for any purpose. This is a serious issue and Facebook took a lot of hit due to such incident.

The political sphere is also concerned about people’s privacy rights and it is sure that in near future we are going to see stringent privacy laws in countries which may stop companies form selling the private data of their users.