Book & film trilogy
IS FACEBOOK GOOD FOR YOU?
Use by courts
In December 2008, the Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory ruled that Facebook is a valid protocol to serve court notices to defendants. It is believed to be the world's first legal judgement that defines a summons posted on Facebook as legally binding.[98]
In March 2009, the New Zealand High Court associate justice David Glendall allowed for the serving of legal papers on Craig Axe by the company Axe Market Garden via Facebook.[99]
Criticism
Facebook has met with some controversy over the past few years. In October 2005, the University of New Mexico blocked access to Facebook from its campus computers and networks.[100] It cited a violation of the university's Acceptable Use Policy for abusing computer resources as the reason, stating the website forces use of the university's credentials for activity not related to the university. The school later unblocked Facebook after the website rectified the situation by displaying a notice on the login page stating the credentials used on the website are separate from the ones used for their school accounts.[101] The Ontario government also blocked access to Facebook for its employees in May 2007, stating the website was "not directly related to the workplace".[102]
On January 1, 2008, a memorial group on Facebook posted the identity of murdered Toronto teenager Stefanie Rengel, whose family had not yet given the Toronto Police Service their consent to release her name to the media, as well as the identities of her accused killers — despite the fact that under Canada's Youth Criminal Justice Act, it is illegal to publish the name of an underage criminal.[103] While police and Facebook staff attempted to comply with the privacy regulations by deleting posts mentioning her name, they noted it was difficult to effectively police individual users who repeatedly republished the deleted information.[104]
Due to the open nature of Facebook, several countries have banned access to it including Syria and Iran.[105][106] The Syrian government cited the ban was on the premise that the website promoted attacks on authorities.[105][107] The government also feared Israeli infiltration of Syrian social networks on Facebook.[105] Facebook was also used by Syrian citizens to criticize the government, and public criticism of the Syrian government is punishable by imprisonment.[105] In Iran, the website was banned because of fears that opposition movements were being organized on the website.[106]
On February 5, 2008, Fouad Mourtada, a citizen of Morocco, was arrested for the alleged creation of a faked Facebook profile of Prince Moulay Rachid of Morocco.[108][109][110][111][112][113][114]
Beacon
Facebook announced Facebook Beacon on November 7, 2007, a marketing initiative that allows websites to publish a user's activities to their Facebook profile as "Social Ads" and promote products.[115] When launching Beacon, Facebook stated "no personally identifiable information is shared with an advertiser in creating a Social Ad", and that "Facebook users will only see Social Ads to the extent their friends are sharing information with them."[116] After Facebook was criticized for collecting more user information for advertisers than was previously stated, Zuckerberg publicly apologized on December 5, 2007 for the way Facebook launched Beacon, saying, "The problem with our initial approach of making it an opt-out system instead of opt-in was that if someone forgot to decline to share something, Beacon still went ahead and shared it with their friends."[117][118]
Privacy
Several concerns have emerged regarding the use of Facebook as a means of surveillance and data mining.[119] Two MIT students were able to download over 70,000 Facebook profiles from four schools (MIT, New York University, the University of Oklahoma, and Harvard University) using an automated shell script, as part of a research project on Facebook privacy published on December 14, 2005.[120] The possibility of data mining remains open, as evidenced in May 2008, when the BBC technology program "Click" demonstrated that personal details of Facebook users and their friends could be stolen by submitting malicious applications.[121]
Privacy proponents have criticized the site's privacy agreement, which states: "We may use information about you that we collect from other sources, including but not limited to newspapers and Internet sources such as blogs, instant messaging services, Facebook Platform developers and other users of Facebook, to supplement your profile."[122] Another clause that received criticism concerned Facebook's right to sell a user's data to private companies, stating: "We may share your information with third parties, including responsible companies with which we have a relationship."[123] This concern was addressed by Facebook spokesman Chris Hughes who said, "Simply put, we have never provided our users' information to third party companies, nor do we intend to."[124]
Concerns have also been raised regarding the difficulty of deleting user accounts. Previously, Facebook only allowed users to "deactivate" their accounts so that their profile was no longer visible. However, any information the user had entered into the website and on their profile remained on the website's servers. This outraged many users who wished to remove their accounts permanently, citing reasons such as the inability to erase "embarrassing or overly-personal online profiles from their student days as they entered the job market, for fear employers would locate the profiles".[125] Facebook changed its account deletion policies on February 29, 2008, allowing users to contact the website to request that their accounts be permanently deleted.[126] On May 7, 2009 it was revealed by the New York Times that a bug allowed personal e-mail addresses of Facebook users to be easily accessible. The bug was fixed "within hours of it being reported to us" [127]
Pro-mafia groups' case
In Italy, the discovery of pro-mafia groups[128] caused an alert in the country[129][130][131] and brought the government, after a short debate,[132] to rapidly issue a law which will force ISPs to deny access to entire sites in case of refused removal of illegal contents; the removal can be requested by a prosecutor in any case there is a suspicion that criminal speech (apology or incitement to crime) is published on a website. The amendment was passed by the Senate on February 5, 2008, and now needs to be passed unchanged[133] by the Chamber of Deputies to become immediately effective.
Facebook and other websites, Google included,[134] criticized the amendment emphasizing the eventual effects on the freedom of speech of those users who do not violate any law.
Phishing
In May 2009, Facebook users all over the globe suffered a massive phishing campaign, launched by Russian hackers from servers in Latvia and China that led to thousands of accounts hijacked[135]. Facebook has been criticized for late reaction to this issue as at first it was just trying to block the attack instead of notifying all users that it is spreading outside of the company's control.