Thanks

I've been using Facebook for about four years now and it is a very different service than the service I signed up for. Most of this is due to the fact that I was opted into Facebook's added publicity settings over the years. I never gave my explicit consent and my information was compromised. Facebook has the obligation to be the service I legally agreed to and not share the information without my meaningful consent. Anything less would be unethical.

In February 2009, Mark Zuckerberg responded to privacy concerns raised by The Consumerits,”In reality, we wouldn't share your information in a way you wouldn't want. The trust you place in us as a safe place to share information is the most important part of what makes Facebook work.”

Today, Facebook makes plenty of decisions with my information, sharing it in ways that I don't want – forcing me to go back and change privacy settings again and again. Privacy should be viewed as control and Facebook has made repeated attempts to eliminate privacy and claim that users have more control… when they have actually lost it. Facebook is required to notify users of the ways it uses information, which it neglects to do when users must opt-out after the information has already been made public. With opt-out, users have no choice other than after the fact.

Users must also have a choice – to stick with the service they signed up for originally and opt-out of making their information public. Anything less is a refusal of service. For example, if you opt-out of Facebook's “Connected Profiles” feature, the service notifies you that “your profile information will be removed and your profile page will be left empty.” When someone agrees to the feature because they don't want to lose their information, it is not meaningful consent to share.

Facebook is really the only player in the game, making it too difficult to get up and walk away from the service. This makes Facebook very powerful and its actions very profit-hungry and ethically questionable.

- Cristina

Reality is that people and those responsible for the fallout of misuse (eventually the court system) need to figure things out and how to deal with them.

The issue needs to be looked at from several angles. One of the largest potential revenue sources for Facebook comes from locking people into its platforms, especially by providing identity and authentication ability. As Facebook has opened up the data of their users to application developers, advertisers, and anyone else with money to spend they have not been up front about what information would be publicized. Facebook has also gone forward with an opt-in default configuration for these changes in the US but opt-out for countries that have privacy laws disallowing these changes without an opt-in. This, in my opinion, shows that Facebook does not have their users interests in mind at all and are simply trying to further their business interests. The problem is that without their users they have no business and it may come to a revolt as happened when beacon was launched in order for Facebook to see the error in this default opt-in policy.

One of the most unfortunate aspects of all of these changes that Facebook has made is that the vast majority of their users don't know about them, nor do they understand them. Facebook has also made many of these options difficult to find, and has not clearly defined that some information cannot be made private regardless of the strictest privacy settings the user can activate. Facebook is acting is acting in the best interests of it's revenue streams, but not in the best interest of the generators and holders of the raw data that their customers are interested in. Let's not fool ourselves here, the users of Facebook are not the customers of Facebook. The users are simply cattle to be taken to slaughter.

Facebook will die a slower, and probably more painful, death than myspace. Their current actions however dictate that there can really be no other outcome. Zuckerbergs statements and actions indicate that he doesn't understand the problems with his actions, or simply doesn't care.