Most websites try to take steps in protecting personal information of their users, but mistakes do happen. “Privacy concerns with Facebook have put their concentration on online privacy as a whole”.
Social networking sites have widely spread around the world within the last five years. With the establishment of Facebook by “Mark Zuckerberg” and the continual status of MySpace have made many people have been giving out their personal information out on the internet. These social networks keep track of all communications and exchange used on their sites and they save them for future use. Most users are not aware that they can change the privacy settings and unless they adjust them, their personal information is open to the public.
Social networking sites have provided privacy procedures in order to provide their customers with protection on their personal information. On Facebook for example privacy settings against invasion are provided for all registered users. These settings include the ability to block unwanted individuals (friends) from seeing your profile, the capability to limit who has access to your profile and pictures. If you look at the recent academic papers, it explained that Facebook advertisers can, by process of elimination, glean private information about those who view on their ads.
It is said that there is not an inclusive law that protects consumer online privacy, maters in this area remains handled by FTC as mention by Prof. Miyazaki on his blog.
With United States to outline its privacy law, it has a few countries to learn from, who have recent privacy invasion alerts on Facebook, and these countries are, U.K, Germany Canada. They all had privacy laws that the online businesses have been violating.
In this 21st century stage of digital information, consumers, marketers, the government are still working out what “privacy” means for online practice. The latest Facebook problems are possibly to be fixed more quickly, as the others online companies. And this will be one more situation for the Commerce Department to include in its solution file, as it’s looking through the most efficient way to involve the U.S government in online Privacy argument.
