Social Legal and Ethical Issues of Social Networking Website Facebook

Social, Legal and Ethical Issues of Social Networking Website Facebook

There has been an amazing growth of the social networking sites and their impact in the lives of the users is phenomenon. Facebook which has over 250 million users has influenced the lives of many users in meaningful ways allowing them to connect and stay in touch while socializing through innovative platforms. Facebook is therefore raised several social, ethical and legal concern because of the many users it has and the amount of information it contains. These issues is made more intricate because of the nature of internet which allows for information to be easily shared or made accessible to myriads of people often strangers in a matter of seconds. While some issues are as a result of the different technological aspects of Facebook platform and application, a great deal of them can be solved by excising simple caution with information being shared (Goldman 2007, p.57). This paper will address the different social, ethical and legal issues affecting Facebook. The different sides of the arguments will be considered and various studies will be described to explain these issues further.

Privacy Issues

More personal information than is necessary is sent by the Facebook's application to the developers of plug-ins according to a study conducted at the University of Virginia. Anyone is able to create plug-ins which are then put on the personal pages of Facebook. Personal information could then be easily grabbed by identity theft by developing an application says Adrienne P. Felt who was the study leader. Facebook officials defend their application platform arguing that for it to function properly its necessary that it is liberal with the user's information. They further insist that they would deny access to any application developer who builds a plug-in which is malicious because it would be violation of terms of service of Facebook through data misuse (Young 2008).

Since the company allowed for this freedom in May 2007, there has been creation of thousands of applications for Facebook. Usually the plug-in is added to the user's page and enables some information about the user to be shared to other users who also have added the application. For instance, in Visual Bookshelf the users share a list of books that they have read once they have created it with friends. Other plug-ins have been created by some college students like the stream headlines which the Facebook page of the user is filled with information from the public relations office and other one to allow the library catalog to be searched by users through Facebook.

For an application to be installed in the profile of the users, a box must be checked which gives the application permission to track personal settings and have access to information of the user. There are further warnings from the site which advises the user not to add the application if they are not willing to grant the application access to the information. Ms. Felt disputes this saying that personal data are not important to most of the application on Facebook for the to be able to perform their functions for instance knowing the user's birthday or the friends isn't important to an application enabling catalog search at the library. She argues that there is need for settings to be fine tuned by Facebook to protect the user privacy better.

Her study involved examination of 150 third party plug-ins which were also most popular in Facebook to evaluate if private information were used by them in the accounts of the users. The results were interesting in that no information was needed by 8.7% of the applications, public data such as network, name and friends list was used by 82% and only 9.3% of the applications required any private information like birthday. Though no private information had yet been misused by the Facebook developers, in the future malicious ones might do so therefore before installation of application randomly, the users should first evaluate it. Facebook's servers don't actually run the applications but rather the developer's servers which they also operate. Facebook is contacted by the application server whenever the profile of the user is displayed, and requests private data from the user, the data is then processed by the application and the content to be displayed is sent back to the user. Any data from Facebook is expected to be thrown away by the developers once the content to be displayed has been sent back to the user as part of the Facebook's terms of service (Cotten 2008, p.73).

The company's policies were defended by the Facebook officials by claiming that the types of useful applications that can be developed will be curtailed if the access to users' data is limited to the developers. Several aspects of the access of data cannot be fine tuned by the users because the settings are buried somewhat and changing them involves going to the privacy section and selecting profile section. They further claim security and privacy to be a major priority for Facebook.

B.J. Fogg who is a director for Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University and also co-teaches Facebook application development course at the university concurs that more information than is necessary can be seen by the Facebook applications. However there are minimal risks for use of the Facebook applications and involves trade-offs between benefits and risks.Since sensitive data such as social security numbers are not stored in the site, there isn't much damage that can be done even if the all the information from the user's Facebook profile are snag up by the malicious application developers. He further adds that there is high incentive for strict enforcement of the policies of Facebook and abusive applications ban. Monitoring of the information by the installed applications is known by most users of Facebook. The ethic of openness is practiced by Facebook and being on Facebook makes the person to share certain things freely with other people.

A survey by Pew Internet & American Life Project showed that the most users did not have much concern about their sharing of information online. Of all the respondents sixty one percent were willing to share any information about them that could be discovered online and they didn't see the need to limit.

Effect on education

There have been studies which have linked the use of Facebook and lower grades in colleges. A pilot study in San Diego has indicated that students who have signed up for the social networking get lower grades than their counterparts who hadn't signed up at the university. However it is claimed by over three quarters of users that the use of Facebook does not affect their studies. According to the study co-author Aryn Karpinski, there is no direct causal relationship between lower grades or less studying with Facebook but a relationship does exist. GPA of typically 3.0 to 3.5 was common for the Facebook users and that of between 3.5 and 4.0 for those users who had not signed up for the service. An average of 1 to 5 a week was found in the users and the non-users studied for 11 to 15 hours averagely in a week. 219 students were surveyed by the research at the Ohio State consisting of 117 graduate and102 undergraduate students. 148 of the respondents had an account at Facebook. About 85% undergraduate participants had an account while the graduates were only 52% who were Facebook users. There was a higher likelihood of students who participated in extracurricular activities to use Facebook than those who worked at paid jobs and used their time accordingly (Karpinski 2009).

A disconnect is found in the student claims and the study findings regarding the GPA results whereby 79% of the user of the service denied impact of Facebook in their academic performance. The users claimed in the open ended questions that their use of Facebook wasn't frequent enough for any noticeable impact on their academics. Facebook's use leading to lower grade cannot be necessarily be deduced from the studies because other factors are involved for instance personality traits.

Some students might still have gotten lower grades because if Facebook wasn't there then other ways of avoiding studying would have been found by the students. Too much time being spent on online socializing might have had an effect on the lower GPA. The fact that even graduate students exhibited this behavior is quite significant because they usually have GPAs of over 3.5 and if by their use of Facebook led to their lower grades makes it an amazing finding. Facebook is even popular in the lecture halls at the colleges. Students who are allowed to use laptops by the faculty members in the class have been found browsing the site during class time. The effect of Facebook will not disappear any time soon and better ways of dealing with the situation needs to be developed (Bugeja 2006).

Initially the profiles of the Facebook users was only visible to the confirmed friends but currently the accounts are being increasingly opened up for anyone with an account giving vital information like addresses, number of cell phones and class and work schedules through the online search. This information is being used often without the knowledge of the prospecting student by the admission office in making some of its decisions while recruiting new students. This is due to the desire to learn more about the life of the student and their culture. Most faculty members actually attribute this as an interesting way of learning the student.

Recruitment for employment

There are concerns whether the looking up of information in Facebook of prospective employees and applicants for internship is legal or even ethical. This has been made possible due to poor privacy features of the site which allows for the information to be available not only to the close friends but be made public knowledge. No case has yet been presented on the courts regarding this issue and there lacks proper guidance presently because most of these situations haven't been tested the courts yet. There are however a few things that have been observed from this situation. Questions have been raised about the legality of making hiring decisions based on the review of Facebook's content. As long as the state or federal discrimination laws are not violated in using the information for hiring decisions then it is legal. For instance the applicant cannot be screened based on the ethnicity or race by the employer. The other concern is whether the privacy of the user has been invaded when the employer gains access to the profiles or even photos. According to Les potter, there is lower privacy expectation of whatever is posted online since the posted information is publicly available therefore its viewership doesn't constitute privacy invasion (Potter 2008).

Facebook is not entirely because its privacy setting is designed to prevent the availability of the users profile to the others except the friends and those in the network of the user. Therefore if these settings are used properly then the information is obtained by the employers or recruiters in unauthorized manner then the user has a legal case. Facebook's terms of service does not address the use of the service by the employers. The use is only restricted to non-commercial and personal use. Information posting that does not attract personal gain is what referred as non-commercial use for instance advertising is. Thus for research purposes, the information can be used for hiring decisions by the employer.

The other concern is on the flip side to the individual using the social networking site at the place of work. Most employees are required to sign an agreement which waives their privacy right. The company's computer equipment use is governed by this agreement and they usually state that there will be monitoring of the use. The employees should therefore be cautious on the stuff that they post online because of their potential damaging or embarrassing nature to their career.

Identity theft

Identity theft is also another social, ethical and legal concern posed by Facebook. It is common for people especially celebrities to find different accounts beside the one they specifically signed up for personally. This can be attributed to weakness of the Facebook signup system which with an attempt to simplify the signup process makes it easy for one to create multiple accounts. Mostly the external requirement is the emails address of which someone can create within a matter of minutes and the account be set up with other fake details. The gullible nature of most of the Facebook users makes them easy identity theft targets because of the personal information that they give according to a survey by Sophos. In the study, a profile of Facebook was fabricated and 200 users asked randomly to give up their personal information. A fake profile page was set up by Sophos by the name Freddi Stauer and personal information displayed of the fictitious Freddi. 200 friends request was sent using Sophos as the front to evaluate the number of people who would respond to the friends request and the type of information particularly personal that the Facebook users could divulge. The Sophos senior security analyst Ron O'Brien expressed his concern at ease which was extremely alarming for acceptance of Freddi. 82 responses were received out of the 200 friends request and email addresses were divulged by 72% of those respondents, full birth date were listed by 84% of the respondents, details about work and education were provided by 87%, current location or address were listed, phone number was given by 23% and screen name used in instant messaging provided by 26% (Backstrom, Huttenlocher, Kleinberg, & Lan 2006, p.46).

Access to respondent's family and friends photos was possible by Freddi. Other information like personal preferences of the person and even details of the employer were also accessed by Freddi. Spouses and partners names were easily disclosed by Facebook users and some send their complete resumes. The maiden name was divulged by the one user and this could be used to gain account information by some websites especially financial ones. This kind of information could not be given out to most people in the street but they seem to ease their guard in the friends request context in Facebook. The Facebook ID Probe results according to Sophos is significant to personal like and workplace because this kind of threat posed by social networking sites to the corporate security. Confidential corporate data can get exposed to the outsiders who may be malicious.

Legal concern for use of information in prosecution

There are legal and ethical concerns on the use of the social networks and in particular Facebook to gain information with intention of being used as evidence. Questions are being raised on whether the attorney or investigator can friend witness involved in the prosecution with the intention of gaining impeachment evidence. And the ethical and legal bars to gather data surreptitiously from Facebook profiles are also being questioned. The other concern is whether when formulating the access laws, the user intent should have any bearing. These and other similar challenges are facing the current legal and ethical issues in the online environment in the current social networking age (Fayle 2007).

Profile content is the area that has raised much of the discussion especially the difference between criminal and civil cases in cases when the familiar defense/prosecutor imbalances exist. Again the privacy of some information is also questioned whenever unintended parties want requires its view-ship. For instance, should deleted information of a person be viewed by the employer? The high availability of the personal information in the social network makes it necessary in and important when making various decisions but this raises the concern of privacy of the individual. Some schools have asked for the student login information so as to access the students' profiles in the case of offenses but currently there are no legal rights that allow the school to compel the students to submit their passwords and user names to the administrators. A legal disclosure requirement would apply in some cases. Evidence gathered using other means could possibly be presented in the cases, say in divorce cases so as to bolster it. Facebook officials maintain have argued against such decision arguing that the profile content of the user is private. Although the kind of information available in the social networking sites would be of compelling nature in various cases this privacy concern hinders their use (Charnigo & Barnett-Ellis 2007, p.23).

If the corporate roadblock of Facebook could be circumvented then their profiles copies in the social network could be presented as evidence in the court by the witnesses. However it is not possible for the witness to be compelled by the judge to do so. The defense attorney obtaining a subpoena for social network access will require the prosecutor to be very cooperative. For law enforcement and government attorney, life is very different.

Because of the transient nature of some contents like status updates and photos, they shouldn't be viewed and actually accorded differently from other documentary evidence. A question on whether the privacy restrictions raised by the users makes some contents different from other memorializing types. The other unique nature of the online content is its long searchable life. Commercial entities hold the power for deciding what is private. Other legal concerns are on the comments and images posted on Facebook and who the interpreting responsibility should lay upon when the harm caused is weighed against the probative value. Superior court of Santa Clara Judge Kurt Kumli has observed that a protective order cannot be violated if the victim in a domestic violence matter follows the victim in Facebook.

Sexual orientation search

The possibility to search for a network basing on its sexual orientation led to a lot of controversies for Facebook. With the use of search functionality, one was able to identify users who are gay, heterosexual or lesbians. Other research study which has been done in this area has shown that the gay men could be identified through the friends in Facebook. This was done by two students in MIT. The possibility of predicting the sexual orientation of men through sexuality and gender analysis of their social networking contacts was established by the study. This was regardless of the privacy of the rest of information found in their profile. People might still be making their private information public even though they believe that their online habits are discreet. Facebook friends of over 1500 fellow students were scanned by study researchers Behram Mistree and Carter Jernigan (Moore 2009). Their sexual orientations were on their profiles set as either gay, straight or bisexuals. From the study it was established that more gay friends were found with the homosexual men than the straight men. Therefore a computer program could be devised that would allow the possibility of predicting of other user's sexual orientation basing on their friends' sexual orientation. When the program was tried on 10 homosexual men who had however not indicated this information on their profiles and the results were all positive correctly identifying them as gay. These results indicated that the information control is never absolutely with the user once it has been put online and the level to which it can be manipulated is striking. However the software couldn't identify accurately the bisexuals or lesbians when it was run on 947.

Search of private profiles

The searches functionality using religion, relationship status and sexual orientation could bring results that provide information that was perceived private previously. For instance a search for women interested in random relationship in major U.S. city gave photos and names of high school girls. The users of Facebook are allowed to designate their profile pages as open, private or semiprivate. This however does not change how one turns up in the searches of Facebook or if it is still indexed by search engines even if the profile has been marked visible to friends only. To enhance the privacy it is necessary for the user to make adjustments at the search preferences. Otherwise the search engines will still be able to index their profiles making their names, personal data and photos easily searched by Facebook member to the same group or network such as geographical area or school (Singel 2007).