Facebook Raises Privacy Issues 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 escerpt 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 Facebook to underzo

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 appi, 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$.,$ FarmVille, Texas HoldEm, 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 setting. At least

one of the companies linked the Facebook data to its own database of Intemet 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 eatimated 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 gemi$-$automated, with Facebook providing guggestions

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 Suggeations 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 settings

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. Uvers who do not want their name associated with a

photo must manually "untag" 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 reenabled it in the

United States after making what the company called "technical improvements" to the feature.

Google had developed aimilar facial recogrition technology for smartphones for its Google

Goggles application, but did not release the facial recognition portion of that app. Google

chairman Eric Schmidt said: $"$As far as I know, it's the only technology that Google bri