Facebook is a social media site that I visit a few times per week. The content that Facebook allows includes pretty much whatever you like to put on it. There are clauses under the “protecting other people’s rights” and “safety” sections of Facebook’s terms of use stating that you cannot upload viruses, bully, post spam etc. although there is nothing set in place (that I could find) that stops these things happening. The only way i could find that you can get caught for doing these things is if someone is offended by it and reports you. Nudity and the like are not recommended and you can have your account suspended if the mentioned material is posted, although, again there is no screening that stops such material being published, aside from being specifically reported by a fellow user. The terms of use sight does say that they will not give your content or information to advertisers without your consent, although earlier in the page it states “for content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permissions, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grand us non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensed, royalty-fee, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP licence).” my understanding of this clause is that they have right to use your information however they want, if you have not changed your Facebook privacy settings to state otherwise. These seem like two contrasting statements. Facebook’s privacy statement does not actually guarantee anything, unless you go through the privacy setting and change them on your own. When someone first joins Facebook their privacy settings are automatically set to the lowest setting, this person needs to take it upon themselves to change their privacy settings to how they would like them. To me, If I put something on the internet that I didn’t want anyone to see and that information was taken by Facebook and sold onto a third party, that is my own fault! If Facebook decided to make a coffee table book of stupid status updates, funny groups or ugly photos, (which legally they can do) it would be highly unethical, and a stupid move by Facebook in a marketing sense. Facebook has over 750 million active users (as of July 2011), and is one of the most popular social networking sights in the world. If for example Facebook did decide to make this coffee table book, they would evidently upset these 750 million active users thus resulting in a decline of active user.This could possibly lead to a fall that social networking sights such as MySpace or bebo have suffered in the wake of Facebook. All in all, Facebook could shape up their privacy settings to make its users more aware, and could maybe implement more screening processes to make sure that explicit material could not be posted. But if people do not want their information searched and found by third parties, then they should not post their information in an easily accessible place such as the world wide web.
