1. Do you agree with Facebook’s philosophy of automatically enrolling users in new features without their knowledge or consent? Why or why not?

2. What concerns might a Facebook user have with the Tag Suggestions feature?

3. Do you use the Facebook Photo Tag Suggestions feature? Why or why not?

Since its founding in 2004, Facebook has changed dramatically—expanding from a tiny start-up firm to an Internet powerhouse, with a market value over $60 billion and revenue in excess of $5 billion in 2012. Facebook has also changed the way it manages its users’ privacy—going from being a private Web site where you could communicate with just the people you chose to becoming a forum where much of your information is made public. An excerpt from the earliest Facebook privacy policy reads:No personal information that you submit to Facebook will be available to any user of the Web site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings. Contrast this with an excerpt from Facebook’s privacy policy in 2013: When you connect with a game, application or website…we give the game, application, or website…your basic info (we sometimes call this your "public profile"), which includes your User ID and your public information. We also give them your friends’ User IDs (also called your friend list) as part of your basic info. This change in its approach to privacy is causing Face-book to undergo increasing scrutiny of its policies and actions in terms of safeguarding the information of its more than 750 million active monthly users. Most of the Facebook applications, or apps,that enable users to play games and share common interests are created by independent software developers. In 2010, it was uncovered that many of these apps (e.g., Farm Ville, Texas Hold Em, and Frontier Ville) were transmitting users’ unique Facebook user IDs to at least two dozen marketing and database firms, where they were used to build profiles on users’ online activities. Because a Facebook user ID is a public part of all Facebook profiles, knowledge of user IDs enables a company to determine the users’ names even if they set all their Facebook information to be private; companies can simply perform a search using the ID to find the person’s name. The user IDs may also reveal the users’ age, address, and occupation, and can allow a company to access photos for those users who did not specify the most restrictive privacy set-ting. At least one of the companies linked the Facebook data to its own database of Internet users’ data, which it sells to other marketers. Interestingly, Facebook prohibits app developers from sharing data about users to outside marketing and database companies. However, it has been difficult for Facebook to enforce its rules for the more than half million apps that run on its Web site. Facebook itself was caught transmitting user ID numbers under certain conditions when users clicked on an ad; Facebook discontinued the practice after it was reported in the press. In December 2010, Facebook implemented a new Tag Suggestions feature for photos. When users add photos to their Facebook pages, the Tag Suggestions feature uses facial recognition software to suggest the names of people in the photos based on photos in which they have already been tagged. It is estimated that more than 100 million people tag photos every day on Facebook. Although users could always tag photos of their Facebook“Friends,” the Tag Suggestions feature process is now semi automated, with Facebook providing suggestions regarding which of your friends is in a photo. Initially the feature was made available to just users in the United States, perhaps because the privacy laws in many other countries are much stricter. However, within five months, Face-book began to roll out the Tag Suggestions feature worldwide. European Union data protection regulators are now studying the new feature for possible privacy rule violations. Facebook also changed its users’ privacy settings to make the facial recognition feature a default; users must opt out of having their names suggested for photos by changing their privacy set-tings to disable the feature. However, Facebook does not give its users the option not to be tagged in any photos; a user’s Facebook Friends can still tag a user in a photo manually, even if the user has disabled the Tag Suggestions feature. Users who do not want their name associated with a photo must manually “un-tag” themselves in each photo. This approach of automatically enrolling users into new features without their knowledge or consent has become standard practice for the firm as a means of ensuring that users experience the full effects of Facebook. Facebook temporarily suspended Tag Suggestions in 2012, but in early 2013, the site re-enabled it in the United States after making what the company called“technical improvements”to the feature. Google had developed similar facial recognition technology for smartphones for its Google Goggles application, but did not release the facial recognition portion of that app. Google chair-man Eric Schmidt said:“As far as I know, it’s the only technology that Google built and after looking at it, we decided to stop. People could use this stuff in a very, very bad way as well as in a good way.”