The great Facebook privacy debate

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Social networks are a phenomenon. Facebook now has more than 300 million users and is making money and, as more and more of us connect to the internet, such networks are becoming as much a part of our day as mobile phones and television.

There are many perfectly understandable reasons why users might want to connect to social networks – it’s a place where people can go online to discover others with common interests, reunite with old friends and also connect with their professional peers.

Thanks to the ability to forge and build relationships with individuals and/or communities, information transfer between groups becomes easy. Although teenagers have always been known to populate the networks, more growth is actually occurring among those over 35.

Privacy and security of social networks

But there are huge issues over privacy and the security of personal information on online sites, with people having profiles that are both public and private, displaying the identities of their creators.

As other people see these profiles, they can be used and abused. Users have been fired for things that they have posted online, and old online pictures have been used to undermine people and even affect political careers.

In one of the worst cases, a British woman called Hayley Jones was murdered by her ex-boyfriend for changing her relationship status from married to single.

There was also much controversy over a Facebook advertisement system called Beacon that allowed data from users' browsing habits on external sites – such as when they bought a DVD – to be fed into Facebook and shown publicly on a news feed.

This proved so controversial that, a month after the launch, Facebook had to switch Beacon into an opt-in policy rather than the previous opt-out policy, where users were automatically using the feature until they declared otherwise.

Facebook will have to get rid of Beacon completely, after settling a year-long lawsuit from users who felt that the scheme was forced upon them.

Facebook apps

Even Facebook apps see a lot of your personal data. For instance, taking part in this quiz will show you that an app creator can see all the information on your profile, even if you have put in high privacy settings.

There are no default privacy settings and no developer screening, which means that anybody can build Facebook applications and mine data.

On a more fundamental level there are other issues with social networks. Users do not know their audience and who is reading what they are writing.

Information also seems to be stored forever. That's not exactly surprising given that the real value of a social network lies in its size and the amount of information it keeps.

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