Facebook is one of the biggest social networking giant which currently has 2.37 billion monthly active users. This mega company is founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes in 2004. However facebook wasn’t his first and only company. Back into Harvard University at the age 17 he launched a website named Facemash in 2003. This website was set up for Harvard students as hot or not. The website allowed visitors to compare two female student pictures side by side and let them decide who was more attractive. We can say this was a huge success for him at that point of time because facemash attracted 450 visitors and 22,000 photo-views in its first four hours online.
However Harvard administration forced to shut it down and Zuckerberg was charged with breach of security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy. Ultimately, the charges were dropped. Issues of privacy can be traced down to Zuckerberg’s history right from the college. His idea behind a social networking site was having a complete transparency of information, people, and their social activities basically asking people to have the access of their privacy for showing them better results. With results I mean if someone has to find a person nearby or if someone wants to view some events or clubs in their neighbourhood then it’s by default that they have to share their location and other details with the company.
Transparency was one of the key elements which facebook had to grow its member. With this transparency idea users were forbidden from adopting false identities. The company’s management argued that transparency is necessary for forming personal relationships, sharing ideas and information, and building up society as a whole. It also noted that the bottom-up, peer-to-peer connectivity among Facebook users makes it easier for businesses to connect their products with consumers.
The company’s success was dependent on the number of users because facebook earned from advertising content to its users so if more number of users are there then more the companies would love to advertise on facebook in short facebook created a platform for users to find and meet new people globally or locally and for business people it provided a platform to advertise about 2.3 billion people at the same time.
Facebook began growing by introducing some of the key features like wall, timeline, idea of tagging people and using ‘#’, giving a like to a comment or a picture and then by developing other platforms like instagram and snapchat. As these things were letting people know the world and helping them to connect globally, advertisers were able to create new and effective customer relationships and so many companies began using the social network for marketing and advertising. In terms of business this was a perfect business model because according to a survey an adult in USA spends 38 minutes daily on such platforms.
Now comes another big privacy issue from facebook that was Cambridge Analytica: A timeline of the data hijacking scandal. I think because the issue was directly linked to USA presidential elections of 2016 Zuckerberg had paid a hefty fine. The charges on facebook was that it sold out millions of its users personal data to Cambridge Analytica which had effected the 2016 elections and brexit vote.
In April 2010, Facebook announced the launch of a platform called Open Graph to third-party apps. This update allowed external developers to reach out to Facebook users and request permission to access a large chunk of their personal data — and, crucially, to access their Facebook friends’ personal data too. If accepted, these apps would then have access to a user’s name, gender, location, birthday, education, political preferences, relationship status, religious views, online chat status and more. In fact, with additional permissions, external sites could also gain access to a person’s private messages.
We can’t say whether this was a mistake made by Zuckerberg or it was a part of business to increase the worth of facebook. Because in this data scandal more than 50 million user personal data was with Cambridge Analytica in order to profile and target users for political advertisements.
Anyways nowadays these big tech giants are using data of millions of users to provide a highly customized web search, products, advertisements, etc. We can’t blame only Facebook even Google uses its user’s data. Like most of people say 20th century was a golden period for fuel industry similarly I believe 21st century is a golden period for those who has a large customer/consumer based database and for whole technological era privacy will always be a concern and maybe after AI we won’t have any control on our privacy!
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