Social, Legal, and Ethical Issues of Facebook Explored

Introduction

There has been remarkable growth in social networking sites, and their impact on the lives of users is a genuine phenomenon. Facebook, which has over 250 million users, has influenced the lives of many people in meaningful ways, allowing them to connect, stay in touch, and socialize through innovative platforms. Facebook has therefore raised several social, ethical, and legal concerns because of the sheer number of its users and the volume of information it contains. These issues are made more complex by the nature of the internet, which allows information to be easily shared or made accessible to large numbers of people — often strangers — within seconds. While some issues arise from specific technological aspects of the Facebook platform and its applications, a great deal of them can be mitigated by exercising simple caution about the information being shared (Goldman 2007, p. 57). This paper addresses the different social, ethical, and legal issues affecting Facebook. Multiple sides of each argument are considered, and various studies are described to explain these issues further.

Privacy Issues and Third-Party Applications

According to a study conducted at a major university, Facebook's application platform sends more personal information than is necessary to the developers of plug-ins. Anyone is able to create plug-ins, which are then placed on the personal pages of Facebook users. Personal information could then be easily harvested for identity theft by developing an application, according to Adrienne P. Felt, who led the study. Facebook officials defended their application platform, arguing that limiting access to user data would curtail the types of useful applications that could be developed and that the platform must be liberal with user information for it to function properly. They further insisted that they would deny access to any application developer who builds a malicious plug-in, as that would violate Facebook's terms of service through data misuse (Young 2008).

Since Facebook opened its platform to third-party developers in May 2007, thousands of applications have been created. Typically, a plug-in is added to the user's page and enables some information about the user to be shared with other users who have also added the same application. For instance, in Visual Bookshelf, users share a list of books they have read with their friends once they have created it. Other plug-ins have been created by college students, such as one that fills a user's Facebook page with information from a public relations office and another that allows users to search a library catalog through Facebook.

For an application to be installed in a user's profile, a box must be checked granting the application permission to track personal settings and access user information. The site also displays further warnings advising users not to add an application if they are unwilling to grant it access to their information. Ms. Felt disputes the necessity of this broad access, arguing that personal data is not important to most Facebook applications for them to perform their functions — for instance, knowing a user's birthday or friend list is not important to an application that enables a library catalog search. She argues that Facebook needs to fine-tune its settings to better protect user privacy.

Her study examined 150 of the most popular third-party plug-ins on Facebook to evaluate whether they used private information from user accounts. The results were revealing: 8.7% of the applications required no information at all; 82% used only public data such as the user's network, name, and friends list; and only 9.3% of applications required any private information, such as a birthday. Although no private information had yet been misused by Facebook developers at the time, malicious developers might do so in the future. Therefore, before randomly installing an application, users should first evaluate it. Facebook's servers do not actually run the applications — rather, they run on the developer's own servers. Whenever a user's profile is displayed, the application server contacts Facebook and requests private data about the user; the data is then processed by the application and the resulting content is sent back to the user. As part of Facebook's terms of service, developers are expected to discard any data received from Facebook once the content has been sent back to the user (Cotten 2008, p. 73).

Facebook officials defended the company's policies by claiming that limiting developers' access to user data would curtail the types of useful applications that can be developed. Several aspects of data access cannot be fine-tuned by users because the relevant settings are somewhat buried — changing them requires navigating to the privacy section and selecting the profile section. The company further claimed that security and privacy are a major priority for Facebook.

B. J. Fogg, director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University and co-teacher of a Facebook application development course at the university, concurs that Facebook applications can access more information than is strictly necessary. However, he argues that the risks involved in using Facebook applications are minimal and involve trade-offs between benefits and risks. Since sensitive data such as social security numbers are not stored on the site, there is not much damage that could be done even if malicious application developers obtained all the information from a user's Facebook profile. He further adds that there is a high incentive for Facebook to strictly enforce its policies and ban abusive applications. Most Facebook users are aware that installed applications monitor their information. Facebook practices an ethic of openness, and being on Facebook means that a person shares certain things freely with other people.

A survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project showed that most users did not have much concern about sharing information online. Of all respondents, 61% were willing to share any information about themselves that could be discovered online and did not see the need to limit such sharing.

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