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).
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