Facebook… one of the most prominent, if not the most prominent, social network in the world. Ahead of its time and way ahead of the competition such as Google’s Plus One and Myspace has had many of its own difficulties to deal with, most specifically in the privacy sector. The Government has really cracked down on Facebook for its privacy policies and the information that they take from users, what they do with it, and the places that they expose it. Many people may not be aware, but as of very recently Google announced that it would even begin indexing and searching through a lot of Facebook data so that it could come up in search.There are a plethora of groups out there that are against a lot of what is going on with our data and want to protect the general public. Although Facebook is a free service we pay for that by giving up freedom and access to our personal data such as locations we visit, who our friends are, and more. I recently heard at a conference that the a barebones facebook account for somebody with almost no data is still worth about $8,000 to Facebook. All of the targeted ads we are shown, the data they collect and more mean that there are true dollar signs over our heads to these big corporations and networks for using their free services and that means that mixed intentions can crop up.
Most recently now the Federal Trade Comission ( FTC ) has put audits on Google and Twitter as well as Facebook to begin really watching and trying to protect the American public from harm. More importantly though these organizations are protecting the Globe because these services are not isolated to just the United States and are really a platform for connecting the Global Peoples of the World. Some of the outcomes of these probes include Facebook needing users to “opt-in” to what information they want to publicly share and give out.