It is no longer safe, Facebookers.

As we all know, the participation of social networking sites has dramatically increased in recent years. Examples of social networking sites are like, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and many more. These sites actually allow millions of people to create a user profile in it and start interacting with friends. A profile is a list of identifying information. (Dwyer et al. 2007) Personal data are actually being requested in the signing up forms, hence this creates a chance of our data being retrieved by third party and this is a very dangerous condition. Facebook members reveal a lot of information about them, and are not very aware of privacy options or who can actually view their profile. (Acquisti and Gross, 2006) Third parties may build a database of Facebook data to sell. Intruders may steal passwords, or entire databases, from Facebook. (Jones & Soltren, 2005) For example, when we are about to access to a certain new application or games in Facebook, it will lead you to a page and says that “requesting permission for accessing my basic information, post to my wall and access my data anytime.” In my experience, this came out every time when I’m trying out some new games application on Facebook.

*A comic strip by joyoftech.com describing the pull of information of apps in Facebook.

In addition to that, Facebook had actually admitted that admitted that some of its applications have been transmitting user information to advertising companies. Where are the privacy and the personal data protection? Facebook in earlier years was only available to users that have a valid email address. Besides that, the target audiences are usually incoming freshman of colleges and universities. However, in the late year of 2007, Facebook announced that they are now having partnerships with 3 third party websites, Public Search, Social Ads and Beacon. Besides that, Facebook also made limited public search listings available to search engines such as Google, Msn Live as well as Yahoo at the same year. (Hashemi, 2005)
However, Mike Vernal, an engineer of Facebook has actually clarified in his blog that the developer did not intend to pass the information around. It is actually due to the technical details of how browsers work. Furthermore, Facebook has also said that it will introduce new technology to contain the breach and will disable any applications that violate its terms.

1. Dwyer, C, Hiltz, S, Passerini, K 2007, ‘Trust and Privacy Concern Within Social Networking Sites: A Comparison of Facebook and MySpace’, New Jersey Institute of Technology, pp. 1 – 13, retrieved on 13 November 2010, from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.148.9388&rep=rep1&type=pdf.

2. Acquisti, A. and R. Gross. (2006) “Imagined Communities: Awareness, Information Sharing and Privacy on The Facebook.” Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, Cambridge, UK, 2006.

3. Jones & Soltren 2005, Facebook: Threats to Privacy, pp. 1 – 76, retrieved on 13 November 2010, from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.112.3154&rep=rep1&type=pdf.

4. Hashemi Y. 2005, Facebook’s Privacy Policy and Its Third-Party Partnership: Lucrativity and Liability, Journal of Science and Technology Law, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 1 – 24, retrieved on 13 November 2010, from http://128.197.26.3/law/central/jd/organizations/journals/scitech/volume151/documents/Hashemi_WEB.pdf