Implications on society & IT Industry: Facebook Privacy?

[Josh]

Hello.

I like the website, I stumbled across it on google and thought I would join. I found it whilst researching for a report i'm writing. Maybe people could possibly return some feedback/feed-forward.

Basically, i would like to hear and review other people's conclusion on Face book's Privacy ; such as the implications in the IT industry and the implications to society. I would like to understand how other people feel about it, as I am sure there will be some criticism.


My perspective
Facebook privacy is required more than anything, what's stopping anyone from saving their image and impersonating that person, nothing.

I think that the implications in society is that anyone can gain your information, even if your profile is private they still have access to your default image, some standard information, a possible email address and even results on google.


p.s. I'm sorry if this has already been answered, I did try and search for something similar but couldn't find any results.

[toby]

1. Facebook has been known to undo its users' privacy settings without notifying them. That's one of the big reasons that security savvy folks don't like Facebook. Read more about that here: http://www.quitfacebookday.com/

2. Facebook's security is laughable. There's even a Firefox add-on which will allow you to hijack the Facebook logon of anyone using the same public wifi as you. Google Firesheep for more info and gory technical details.

3. Facebook is riddled with viruses. Lots of people will post a link that says something like, "click here to see a picture", but then when you click there, it's not a picture; it's a virus.

4. Facebook is riddled with scams. Like Google and Yahoo, Facebook's primary source of income is advertisements. Unlike Google and Yahoo, Facebook has no standards for who advertises with them. Most of the advertisements in Facebook are scams, pyramid schemes, and a few of them are even malware.