Facebook Information

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What’s Facebook?

Facebook is a web-based, interactive network that allows users to share information and thoughts

over a wide area. It makes possible a connection to those with shared interests across political, economic and geographic borders.

How is it useful?

Facebook isn’t a one-stop shop that will fulfill all your communications needs. It is simply another

tool in your communications toolkit Its purpose is to “go where the eyes are” by furnishing information on websites that you know people visit. With 1 billion users and growing, it’s safe to say “the

eyes are on Facebook.” It raises your profile in the public sphere.

Goals

The goals of your social media effort might look something like this:

● Provide a venue for an exchange of ideas and to encourage communication

● Promote yourself to a variety of audiences including staff, the public, media and business

community

● Demonstrate your role as a strong, clear voice representing the county

● Raise public awareness and understanding of your intentions and actions

The content on your page should be a positive reflection of yourself or county and should answer

any one or more of the following questions:

● What is going on in my county/with me?

● What am I/are we doing to help its community and residents?

● What am I/are we doing to build awareness and understanding of the roles and responsibilities of county government?

● What innovative, interesting programs have been developed that could be promoted?

● What are our county officials doing to address the problems facing the community?

You can post videos or pictures of city events, ask questions, link back to your web page and invite

residents to public events. The bottom line is your content should be interesting, informative and

positive. Where possible, the content should lead to interactive communication within your Facebook page: Engagement is key! Social media is all about facilitating the conversation.

either Facebook or Twitter. You can see what other users are connected to and explore business, resumes and more. Employers can list jobs and search for potential candidates, job seekers can review

the profile of hiring managers/organizations and discover other contacts that can introduce them.

You can also find groups that are centered around your area of professional expertise to share best

practices, tactics and strategies.

How to get started?

● First step is to create a profile, where you can follow along with their profile completion tips,

which increase your visibility and credibility on the site. Be sure to include things like:

– Current position and two previous positions

– Education

– Profile Summary + Photo

– Professional specialties

– Recommendations

● Tags, or keywords, are also key for being able to find relevant information, and for relevant

information to find you. For instance, if you’re a tax consultant, you’d want to incorporate that

phrase throughout your profile, which raises your visibility in searches.

● Customizing your URL (for example, linkedin.com/in/yourname) also raises your visibility and

relevance in search results.

● Recommendations are essential for leaving a great impression with other people and

organizations with whom you have engaged. These provide higher credibility for yourself and for

the person/organization you’re recommending.

● Be sure to join Groups that are relevant to your occupation/professional interests—participating

by answering questions or joining the group discussion is a great way to make a quick impact in

the community.

Introduction :-

With the growth of  social media websites, such as  Facebook, our privacy has  become increasingly more vulnerable to surveillance and commodification. As we have uploaded personal information to social networks, we have increasingly allowed others access to our data. Moreover, most social media users remain largely unaware how vulnerable their personal information has become to information-aggregation and reselling activities. This essay  contends  that  our  ignorance  of  privacy  settings  and  policies  on  social  media websites such as Facebook, has exposed us to potential increases in social harassment, state intrusions, corporate surveillance and commodification, and has also reduced our ability to control how others may perceive us. We may only be able to reclaim our ability to  control  our  privacy  rights  if  we  are  able  to  control  who  may  access  our  personal information through opt-in accessibility options, if we have sufficient groups to monitor our rights, and if we have non-commodified social networks to use.

Conceptualising privacy :-

Privacy can be a complicated concept to define, but a working operational definition of it conceptualises privacy as the right to control access to one’s personal information (Guo, 2010; Fuchs, 2011). The  right to privacy can thus be defined as the right to control the “appropriate flow of personal information” (Nissenbaum, 2010: 126). That is, one should have the right to reasonably exercise control in how and with whom one’s information is shared.   Nevertheless, while access to privacy has positive aspects, it also a right that can have negative  consequences.  Thus,  on  the  one  hand,  privacy  enables  people  to  be  more 

independent,  more  creative,  freer,  individualistic,  and  protects  people’s  dignity,  and protects people  against  the  violation  of  their  personal  information.  On  the  other  hand, however, privacy  also  enables  exploitation,  entrenches inequalities,  secrecy, and  non-transparency (Fuchs, 2011; Fuchs, 2012). Thus, although the protection of privacy may strengthen the ability of some to avoid being violated, it also allows others to render their economic  activities  invisible.  That  is,  it  allows  the  powerful  to  obscure  their  economic ventures  and  thus  enables  them  to  enrich  themselves,  often  at  the  cost  of  the  poor. Consequently, from an empowerment perspective, the right to privacy should be seen as the right to the protection of one’s privacy against the capitalist exploitation of the powerful and corporate  entities,  which usually  occurs in  the effort to  enrich themselves  (Fuchs, 2011).

Background: Facebook :-

Facebook was founded under the leadership of Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard University in early 2004, with the initial intention to create a student directory containing student profiles and  pictures  (Hodge,  2006;  Guo,  2010).  Moreover,  the  website  became  available  for public use in 2006 and by this stage in its development, anyone over the age of 13 could create a profile if they possessed an e-mail address (boyd & Hargittai, 2010; Guo, 2010).   Facebook is characterised as a social media website which “combines features of e-mail, instant messaging, photo-sharing, and blogging programs,  as  well as a way to monitor one’s friends’ online activities” (Cohen, 2008: 6). Thus, Facebook functions as one-stop platform that combines various social activities for its users. According to Fuchs (2011), the defining features of Web 2.0 social networking websites, like Facebook and Myspace, are that they  allow  users  to craft their own profiles, link such profiles together in visible social  networks,  and  allow  users  to  communicate  with  one  another.  Thus,  on  social networking websites, users utilise self-created profiles that act as avatars, to interact with one  another  through  interconnected  social  networks  (Solove,  2007;  Guo,  2010).  In addition,  such  profiles  often  contain  personal  information  such  as  full  names,  contact 

numbers,  e-mail  addresses,  physical  addresses,  occupations,  friendship  networks, photos, records of activities, personal preferences, and demographic information (Solove, 2007).  Facebook,  however,  overtook  Myspace’s  popularity  by  2008  and  became  the  most popular social media website in the world (Guo, 2010).  By 2015, Facebook was worth at least 245 billion US Dollars (La Monica, 2015). Globally, the website has over 968 million daily users and 1.49 billion monthly users, with nearly 844 million mobile daily users and 3.31 billion mobile monthly users (See Figure 1) (Facebook, 2015a). 

Currently, Facebook is the second most popular website globally, with the majority of its

users originating from the United States, India, and Brazil (Alexa, 2015). More specifically,

approximately 83.1% of Facebook’s current users are located outside of North America

(Facebook, 2015a). 

In addition, Facebook has introduced several different features to its platform since 2004.

Its News Feed feature, which was introduced in 2006, allows users to communicate to

and view their friends’ activities on the website. That is, the previously invisible activities

of people on the website became visible to others in their networks with the introduction

of the News Feed feature (Guo, 2010). Furthermore, the feature allows advertisers to

place advertisements directly on to a user’s news feed, thus marketing to the Facebook

user directly (Cohen, 2008). By 2007, Facebook introduced the Beacon feature, which

collected data on the activities of its users, focusing specifically on their shopping habits.

Facebook’s users, however, reacted very badly to this feature and Facebook readjusted

its surveillance methods. Thus, the corporation began to gather aggregate da

Although Facebook’s privacy settings were very minimal at its founding, with users’

profiles fully visible to all other users on the Harvard University campus, the corporation

gradually introduced more sophisticated, yet complicated, settings (boyd & Hargittai,

2010). Facebook’s privacy settings seem to allow its users to fine-tune what information

is shared with whom. More specifically, one can utilise the settings to determine who sees

your profile, what information can be used by third-party advertisers for targeted

marketing, and whether one’s profile can be used by separate websites for ease of access

(Gottsegen, 2015). In other words, through a series of rather complicated steps, one can

limit what those in one’s network can see of your profile and how deeply Facebook and

its advertising partners can mine one’s profile for their benefit. Facebook’s current data

policies indicate that they collect information on the content users upload, information

others upload about one another, information on the devices users connect to their

accounts, as well as information related to the social networks users connect their profiles

to (Facebook, 2015b).

Past research: How people view and use Facebook’s privacy

settings :-

Past research has investigated how people tend to view and use Facebook’s privacy

settings. Acquisti and Gross’ (2006) research suggested that Facebook users mainly

utilised the website to communicate with one another through crafted public personas,

and that although such users were often aware of how publicly visible their profiles were,

they were under the impression that they could manage their profiles so as to render them

private. Nevertheless, they also discovered that many early Facebook users were

unaware of how much their profiles revealed about them online.

In addition, Debatin, Lovejoy, Horn and Hughes’ (2009) research suggested that the vast

majority of early Facebook users had not read the privacy and data policies related to the

website. Although most early Facebook adopters knew they could render their profiles

more private, nearly half chose to not utilise privacy features at all (Debatin et al., 2009). 

They argued that most Facebook users operated according to the ‘third person effect’ in

relation to the website and privacy concerns. In other words, the majority of users were

under the impression that other users were at more risk for privacy violations than they

were and, accordingly, the majority did not fine-tune the privacy settings on their personal

profiles. More specifically, their research found that Facebook users tended to implement

more in-depth privacy measures only if their privacy had personally been invaded on the

website. Thus, most users did not respond favourably to warnings that their privacy could

be violated on Facebook (Debatin, et al. 2009).

Furthermore, boyd and Hargittai’s (2010) study on how the youth utilise privacy settings

on Facebook indicated that the majority of such users had at least attempted to adjust

such settings to render their profiles less visible. They also discovered that Facebook

users from the youth demographic group were more concerned about protecting their

privacy against other individuals they already knew than they were about protecting their

private information from corporate or state entities (boyd & Hargittai, 2010). While their

research showed that there was no gender difference in how people tended to protect

their privacy, they found that those who were frequent Facebook users had adjusted their

privacy settings the most, while those were less familiar with the platform had spent far

less time protecting their profiles (boyd & Hargittai, 2010).

Facebook and personal information: Issues with

commodification and privacy :-

Many social media websites, like Facebook, generate revenue by gathering and selling

information related to and produced by their users to third-party advertisers (Cohen &

Shade, 2008; Cohen, 2008; Nissenbaum; 2010; Fuchs, 2011; Wang et al., 2011; Fuchs,

2012). Web 2.0 websites, such as Facebook, utilise the free labour performed by its

‘prosumers’, to mine the data they have produced for advertising revenue sales (Cohen,

2008). Conceptualising the Facebook user as a ‘prosumer’ frames them as someone who

is both a consumer of Facebook’s networking capacity, and a producer of its network 

content (Fuchs, 2012). Thus, prosumers freely produce the content which constitutes

Web 2.0 websites and through this activity, also provide corporations with valuable

information on their advertising profiles; which ultimately reward those corporate entities

with freely-produced content and readily-accessible advertising markets. Past research

has suggested that people actively perform this type of labour, which keeps websites like

Facebook running, for free in exchange for the creation and maintenance of their social

networks (Cohen, 2008). Thus, the business models of Web 2.0 social media websites

rests on the cycle of ‘free’ consumption, production, and reselling of private information

and communication. That is, the true value of a company such as Facebook lies in its

capacity to mine for and sell its users aggregated private information – in other words, the

commodification of its users’ profiles, networks, and private information (Fuchs, 2012).

In addition to this commodification of Facebook-users’ private information, the

vulnerabilities of Facebook users’ privacy on the platform has also had other

consequences. Firstly, people have used Facebook to harass on another, by, for

example, stalking one another online or releasing embarrassing personal data within each

other’s social networks (Debatin et al., 2009). Thus, it has been possible to exploit the

gaps in Facebook’s protection of its users’ personal information for social activities.

Secondly, in the past, state agencies in the United States have utilised the Patriot Act to

collect information on Facebook users’ profiles, regardless of the privacy measures users

may have implemented to protect their profiles (Debatin et al., 2009). Furthermore, police

and government officials have utilised Facebook profiles and histories to crack down on

activities ranging from underage drinking to criticisms against ex-President George W.

Bush (Hodge, 2006). Consequently, despite reassurances that the company has sought

to protect its users’ personal information, Facebook has shown that it would expose its

user-base to state intrusions. Thirdly, the company earns revenues by selling access to

its users’ personal profiles to third parties and third party applications (Guo, 2010;

Nissenbaum, 2010). This activity has mainly occurred in order to facilitate the production

of targeted marketing campaigns, aimed at social media users in online spaces. On the

one hand, those in favour of the reselling of aggregated information have argued that it 

allows for more targeted communication strategies, thus reducing inefficiency. On the

other hand, those critical of the commodification of aggregated personal information have

posited that its runs the risk of security challenges and of spreading misinformation

through errors (Nissenbaum, 2010). In other words, while targeted marketing may

increase efficient marketing and communication activities, it may also expose people’s

personal information and spread misinformation about people. Finally, an added danger

of having an online record of ourselves and our activities on platforms such as Facebook,

is that it can constrain us from acting naturally and may restrain us from managing our

reputations freely (Solove, 2007). Our reputations are constituted by the collective view

others have of who we are, usually based on relevant information, which describes our

histories and characters. With the increasingly free flow of information online, both

personal and public, which is also increasingly not under the control of any one person, it

has become increasingly difficult to manage our personal reputations and, in turn, how

others perceive us (Solove, 2007). Consequently, the tendency to put our personal

information on social media websites, such as Facebook, has exposed us to increased

social harassment, state intrusions, corporate surveillance and commodification, as well

as having reduced our ability to control how others may perceive us.

Possible solutions :- 

Fuchs (2012) contends that there are three general solutions to deal with the increasing

violations of privacy we face through Web 2.0 platforms. Firstly, he posits that we should

have opt-in privacy policies, whereas most websites currently offer opt-out privacy

policies. That is, Facebook, for example, currently forces its users to go through a series

of steps to opt out of privacy invasions for corporate profit. In contrast, an alternative,

more privacy-friendly approach to Web 2.0 policies would offer users the choice to sell

their information to third parties. Secondly, he posits that we should create more groups

that act as watchdogs against privacy violations. Thirdly, Fuchs (2012) argues that we

should develop Web 2.0 social networking websites that are not driven by a profit motive,

but rather driven by the aim to promote and maintain online social networks. In other

words, if we had social networking websites that were primarily created for social 

networking rather than the generation of corporate profits, our private information would

not be viewed as virtual commodities.

Thus, we could reduce the risk of privacy violation on social media websites by creating

a culture where users have to consent to the commodification of their personal

information; by establishing active and effective groups that monitor privacy settings and

policies; and by promoting the development and maintenance of non-profit online social

networks. In such an environment, people’s personal information would be better

protected against social, corporate, and state exploitation.

Conclusion :- 

In conclusion, the Facebook case study illustrates how our privacy rights on social media

websites have become increasingly vulnerable to exploitation, commodification, and

surveillance. Facebook and other social media platforms have become increasingly

popular and those who utilise such websites have tended to fill their online profiles with

vast amounts of personal information, which in turn, has been mined for re-use and resale by various corporate and state entities. These habits have made it increasingly

difficult for social media users to manage their reputations, to avoid state intrusions into

their private affairs, and to reduce corporate surveillance and exploitation. Nevertheless,

it has been argued that although our privacy has become more vulnerable, we can

strengthen our privacy protections by establishing opt-in privacy policies, by creating

efficient privacy watchdog groups, and by creating social networks that are not driven by

a profit motive.

References

• Acquisti, A., & Gross, R. 2006. Imagined communities: Awareness, information sharing, and privacy on the Facebook. Privacy Enhancing Technologies. Available:
• Alexa. 2015. Facebook Overview. 
• boyd, d. & Hargittai, E. 2010. Facebook privacy settings: Who cares? 
• Cohen, N. & Shade, L. 2008. Gendering Facebook: Privacy and commodification.
• Feminist Media Studies.
• Gottsegen, G. 2015. Here’s how to use Facebook’s mystifying privacy settings. Wired. 
• www.google.com Search Information

Thank You