0. Facebook is an online social networking service company since 2004. It was started as the online platform to be connected for ivy-league university students and later extended to general public. It has a market worth of $ 148 billion in 2014 and has more than 1 billion subscribers online. The case illustrates about the exploitation of user data by Facebook to generate revenue. The user data is used to deliver to highest bidder and earn revenue. 1. Facebook is collecting the extensive personal information from its users. The information is in the form of personal details, pictures and life events. The reason for turning the information into big databases is to serve relevant advertising that suits the taste of a particular person. But, collecting the information to generate revenue is the unethical practice in business and that is the biggest dilemma of Facebook to earn revenue without privacy damage of the users as it provides free service. The company faced various lawsuits for gathering user data without user consent. Even they keep the track of the users visiting Facebook’s widget on other websites by capturing time and IP address information. It is not sure whether the company will stop finding alternative ways to exploit data and selling it to highest bidders for advertising. The reason being the limited source of revenues and failure of management to take care of privacy concerns. 2. Facebook’s mainstream revenue is entirely dependent on advertising. In the year,
In the article “Facebook Is Using You,” Lori Andrews describes the damaging consequences of corporations collecting and selling personal information retrieved from internet users. She explains how this information is often used to create personalized advertisements and while seemingly harmless may have negative implications on internet users’ employability, legal battles or ability to receive credit (552).
So many users of the internet blindly browse and post on these sites without any thought to the online identity they are creating for themselves. Shares, tweets, hashtags, likes, and comments all combine to make up an amalgamation of marketable information. In November of 2016, an average of six thousand tweets were made per second, and ninety-five million Instagram posts were made per day (Sayce; Parker). Facebook “has become the largest database of personal information ever collected,” says Richard, and Facebook takes advantage of this. With almost two billion users, Facebook has no shortage of information to gather (Sparks). They do this mainly for targeted advertising. There is no small profit to be made in this. In 2011 Lori Andrews wrote, “Facebook made $3.2 billion in advertising revenue last year, 85% of it's total revenue.” However, Facebook and other internet corporations also relay data gathered on users to the
The privacy of human being has drastically changed with the advent of internet. On a scale of 1 to 10, the privacy of an internet user is a -1 or may be less. Social Networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace etc are mainly responsible for this privacy leakage. This short paper is dedicated to review the change of privacy policy by Facebook on December 2009 and its impact on public privacy and security.
What once was a ad-less site, one where information and thoughts could be exchanged and debated, has turned into a retail paradise. The methodology behind Facebook’s income is simple, watch and respond. Let us take a real world example of Facebook’s intrusion: an individual posts on Facebook, for their friends to see that their sink broke. Weather it says they are looking for a plumber or not, Facebook will scan the post for keywords: Plumber. Then, as this individual is looking around Facebook, an ad for plumbing services will present themselves in a variety of marketing forms: video, text, or pictures.
At first I agreed wholeheartedly that Facebook sells their clients’ information to businesses and potentially the government itself, after all Google is known to do the same with their search engine. However after I thought and analyzed the language he uses to describe how Facebook uses their “transparency”, I realize that he may very well be overblowing the situation.
The privacy compliance recommends that companies like Facebook should adopt a comprehensive privacy program that is reasonably designed to protect the privacy and security to prevent predictable risks. Another important idea is to abide by the Federal Trade Commission’s rules about keeping their advertising from being misleading and deceptive. Also, an opt-in consent form must be provided to the consumers that their data will be kept private. Overall, any type of changes a company possesses should be disclosed clearly to the
Facebook is a well know social networking site that has taken all over the world with over 500 million people using the site. Social networking sites such as Facebook share information about the user over the Internet, where it can be freely accessed by anyone. This is where issues of privacy to the individual arise. As
First is the advertising. According to the case, we know that the major revenue of Facebook is advertising, which took up 98 percent in 2009, 95 percent in 2010 and 85 percent in 2011. Facebook uses all information uploaded by users to become the property of the firm. By analyzing database, Facebook provides advertisers target customized services and products based on users’ preferences and connections. In its view, the advertising which based on social
Facebook has an array of information assets that it owns by collecting information on its users.
For starters, the sheer amount of data collected is absurd. Some of it is expected, such as names, email addresses, crash reports, and other basic pieces of information. But many companies also drew from unexpected sources. Google collects data from search queries, time and date of phone calls, length of phone calls, and even data on a user’s precise location (Google). And while a user may expect that Facebook collects data from everything they post, they may be surprised to learn that Facebook also collects data on a user from posts by other people. Facebook will even collect information on web activity outside of Facebook via third-party partners (Facebook). And they’re hardly the only companies to do this. In fact, there are companies that exist solely for this purpose. They are known as “data brokers”, and they gather much of their information online. When the Federal Trade Commission did a report on nine major data brokers, they
Andrea Matwishyn” a legal study’s and business professor at Wharton says; "Facebook certainly has a tremendous user base, which is more locked in than any social network before, ustomers stay because the stories of their live photos, videos and status updates are stored on Facebook. And although all of that personal information has value, she notes, advertisers still don't know how to use it. For now, "valuing companies based on customer data is more art than science.
One thing Microsoft, Google and Facebook have in common is that they collect about as much data from each of their visitors as each other, according to an internet marketing research company (Alexa 2012). Users are concerned about the privacy of their personal information, even after the Facebook security expanded its efforts to reduce the risks to the users’ privacy. Facebook Beacon was launched in Nov 2007, a service that was ultimately a failed attempt at advertising specific products to a user’s friends depending on what known purchases that friend had made. As of last month, Facebook has begun to more closely examine the usage of its user data. Facebook accepted that it had deceived users by failing to keep certain promises regarding privacy, and agreed to settle charges laid by the United States Federal Trade Commission.
Facebook is a social net working service, which is started in the United States by Mark Zuckerberg with his friends in 2004. The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges, and gradually globalization. In 2012, the fonder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg decide to convert the structure of Facebook from private limited company to public limited company. Facebook values shares at £24 each, and that its shares would began trading in New York on 18th of May 2012. It is seem that Facebook would be worth £66bn at this price. The following will analyse whether Facebook can benefit from the changing between private limited company to public limited company.
We are currently living in a world where each year we see a new social media network rises in popularity that everyone jumps on and uses religiously. Recently, we discovered Snapchat and witnessed its mad growth, before that was Pinterest, and even before that, Instagram. But, all of these social networks brings on their own data privacy problems, and while we sleep in the other part of the world, they monetize it here by spreading our information a little more around the Internet. We live in an era where Graph Search, Facebook’s new technology, gives strangers in detail access than ever to our "private" data and Google arbitrarily stores our passwords and emails. Currently, a class action lawsuit is filed against Facebook in Austria over alleged breaches of privacy laws and rights violations.
Claywell (Claywell, 2016) makes it aware to his readers that social media sites like Facebook invite major corporations to invade your privacy and sell your personal information. Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, is a multi-billionaire and his organisation sells ad space to make up this revenue. They run special algorithms which display ads that might appeal to certain users. Many users find this invasive to their privacy and usually just ignore these ads.