Privacy with Facebook

Privacy with Facebook

Waking up from a long night of sleep, I hit my snooze button on my alarm; I reach over to my phone to check if I have any new notifications, friend request, or messages. Next thing I do is look on my Facebook homepage to see what is going on with everyone. To see and to read all of my friends, gossip and to see what is going on with their lives. Many users don't think about the lack of privacy they may sharing with the third parties, and what precautions the users can to protect themselves on Facebook. Simply by being careful what you share on Facebook, limiting your friends, customize your privacy controls. These precautions will limit some of your privacy problems that users have on Facebook, and some issues that they might have not considered before. In fact I believe that all Facebook users should take the time to control their settings on Facebook.

Everybody loves to be on Facebook. But those choices can be dangerous. Some privacy issues that Facebook is having the threat of third parties. Facebook has been critiqued for using "tracking cookies" which allows track users to follow the users profile data. The Federal Trade Commission in Washington contended that Facebook, without warning its users or seeking consent made private information public even though the users thought their information was on private. Jamie Schopflin, Gregg Stefancik, from Facebook stated: " The company compiles tracking data in different ways for members who have signed I and are using their accounts, for members who are logged-off and for non- members. The tracking process begins when initially visit a facebook.com page. If you choose to sign up for a new account, Facebook inserts two different types of cookies in your browser, a session cookie and a browsers cookie. From this point on, each time you visit a third party webpage that has a Facebook like button, or other Facebook plug-in, the plug-in works in conjunction with the cookie to alert Facebook of the date, time and web address of the web address of the webpage you've clicked to. The unique characteristics of your PC and browser, such as your IP address, screen resolution, operation system and browser version, are also recorded. Facebook thus compiles a running log of all your webpage visits 90 days, continually deleting entries for the oldest day and adding the newest to this log. If you are logged-on to your Facebook account and surfing the Web, your session cookie conducts this logging. The session cookie additionally records your name, e-mail address, friends and all data associated with your profile to Facebook. If you are logged off, or if you are a non-member, the browsers cookie conducts the logging, it additionally reports a unique alphanumeric identifier, but no personal information" (Acohido pg 5). By not controlling your settings, you will almost certainly be putting yourself into danger.

Another thing to consider is the teens using Facebook. Teens as we know them 13 to 17 years of age. According to Facebook policy "in order to be eligible to sign up for Facebook people must be thirteen years of age or older" (2). Many people are agreeing that it's not a safe environment for young children and they are just not mature for the network. Younger teens are not yet emotionally ready for the responsibilities with Facebook. Furthermore, teens that are on Facebook are more likely to get bullied or pressured into doing something that they normal don't do just to get noticed. The challenge is knowing what our children are doing on the web to make sure they are safe. As a parent, these are reason should be strong enough to monitor what our children are doing on Facebook.

Another concern about Facebook is should employers respect employees page? Some of the issues that users are posting are comments about co-workers, profanity