Facebook is the revolutionary social-networking site founded in 2004. Facebook users share their identity - to a certain extent their sense of self - and personal information to their online social network by means of their user Profile and by sharing information with other users. Everything that a user posts to Facebook is the ownership of the individual user, but everything in regard to intellectual property, the user gives Facebook a “non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook” (Facebook terms of service). While a user owns the information, Facebook is able to mind that information in order to offer personalized ads to users, thus generating revenue from user’s personal information.
Contents
Facebook Features
Through the use of user Profiles users are able to share their photos, interests, and personal information to their social-network. Furthermore, users are able to communicate to each other by posting publicly on ‘friends’ walls, sending private messages to other users and chatting with ‘friends’ through the use of Facebook chat/messages. Recently Facebook introduced two new features: Timeline and Frictionless Sharing that takes users sharing of information to new heights. Through the timeline users will be able to create a timeline of their entire life for their friends to see. Moreover, through the use of frictionless sharing the need for users to manually share experiences to Facebook is removed. For example, a user of Spotify will now have the songs the user is listening to automatically posted to that users wall for his/her friends to see.
Ethical concerns surrounding Facebook
There are several ethical implications regarding Facebook’s use of user information.
Information Transparency
It is unclear how Facebook uses the information that they collect to provide personalized to individual users. Furthermore, it is unclear exactly what information Facebook is collecting. Do they keep track of every single time a user logins in or out.
Other Ethical Considerations
Several applications such as Spotify require that a user have a Facebook account in order to use that application. Such requirements don’t give users a choice and to a certain extent monopolize the Facebook platform.
