Facebook and your privacy
By Lauren Duffy
With Oscar-contender "The Social Network" at number one in the Box Office, and social networking booming, Facebook is more prominent in the collective conscious than ever.
Despite its explosive worldwide success, Mark Zuckerberg's creation still finds itself the subject of heavy criticism due to privacy concerns.
Although Facebook has made strides to help ensure user privacy in the past few months, its complex privacy policy leaves many Facebook owners bewildered as to where exactly their information is going and, more importantly, who can access that information.
Users who want to make their information private are required to click through more than 50 buttons, making the confirmation of one's privacy online a time-consuming and confusing endeavor.
According to The New York Times, the privacy policy of Facebook is now longer than the United States Constitution.
Last week Zuckerberg announced a series of new features and updates at a press conference at the Facebook campus in Palo Alto. Updates include a complete overhaul of the "groups" feature, as well as a "dashboard" that allows you to manage third-party applications.
In a recent interview with TechCrunch, Zuckerberg argued that privacy is no longer a "societal norm," due to the popularity of blogging and social networking sites. Facebook is now a global enterprise, with about 70 percent of its users living outside of the United States and 500 million active users overall.
Facebook Mobile is a rapidly expanding addition that allows anyone with a smart phone to log in anywhere, anytime. Facebook Mobile users are twice as active as non-mobile users, according to Facebook's statistics page.
In August, Facebook introduced "Places," an application that allows users to "check in" to their current location through GPS-enabled smart phones.
It's remarkable to think that the global headquarters of the second-most trafficked website in the world are located only twenty miles from the Santa Clara campus.
Beyond our physical proximity to this internet kingpin, it seems that the most intimate aspects of our personal lives can become deeply intertwined with this expanding, profitable enterprise.
The integration of Facebook into the daily routines of millions reflects a massive societal trend, with people spending over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook. Millions have come to love the laid-back convenience and global cohesiveness that Facebook promotes.
Established a mere six years ago, Facebook has already radically altered the nature of interpersonal communication...just imagine what the next six years will bring.