Assignment 5 : Facebook

Facebook: It’s About the MoneyIntroduction

Facebook  is an online social networking service headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Its name comes from a colloquialism for the directory given to students at some American universities. Facebook was founded on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The founders had initially limited the website's membership to Harvard students, but later expanded it to colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities and later to their high-school students. Facebook now allows anyone who claims to be at least 13 years old worldwide to become a registered user of the website, although proof is not required.

Perform an ethical analysis of Facebook, what is the ethical dilemma presented by this case?
Facebook is the leading Social Networking Site of the World. Facebook mission is to make the world more open and connected. Facebook helps Internet users stay connected with their friends, families, and colleagues. It helps them discover and learn more about what is going on in the world around them. It helps them express themselves by sharing their opinions, ideas, photos, and activities. However, what the company actually does is to share tons of information about users with large multinational advertisers to bring the benefit for it. Advertisers can engage with users based upon the information shared by users such as age, gender, location, education, work history or specific interests. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg often says that people want to be more open and connected.   It's unclear whether that is truly the case, but it is certainly true that Facebook wants the world to be more open and connected because it stands to make more money in that world.

What is the relationship of privacy to Facebook’s business model?
Talking privacy to Facebook is a bit ironic. Facebook’s entire business model is based on aggregation and sharing user information. They give people a free social media platform to use and in turn sell advertising and insights based on what they learn about user. Facebook has massive capabilities to collect, store and analyze data. This allows Facebook to sell very targeted advertising. Therefore, privacy is the Facebook business model.

   

Describe the weaknesses of Facebook’s privacy policies and features.  What management, organization, and technology factors have contributed to those weaknesses?
The weakness behind Facebook's privacy issues was a lack of communication between Facebook and its users. The facebook.com has try to protect their users privacy information a lot, but there still have some weaknesses which didn’t solve. People are worry about the handling and usage which the facebook doing with “the extensive information it collects from its users. But the situation is, the facebook should try they best to use their users privacy information to increase the revenues, but they can’t violate the privacy of there users. So in my opinion, the facebook are make profit from their user’s information, but lots of users think their information are privacy and they don’t believe the facebook’s privacy policies. So the facebook should pay lots of money to “truly capitalize on the massive audience and immersive environment of the site. That’s all the weaknesses of Facebook’s privacy policies. The company’s Beacon advertising service was the management to help the facebook to develop their privacy policies, this service can help the users to protect their account and protect their information also. But this assumption was often making mistakes, so many people are protest the Beacon. A organization which called the civic action group MoveOn.org created a facebook group to against the Beacon. So finally the Facebook.com change this service and gave their users the ability to disable it completely.

The New Feed feature is another example of the facebook.com use their users information incorrectly. People think it’s “overly invasive so another organization “Students against Facebook News Feed” start to against this feature.

Now, Facebook has joined Myspace and other social network in offering a simpler process to permanently delete your account and the personal information it contains. Facebook has developed many applications or features like the Facebook Platform to solve these weaknesses; they are widely use on the programs in Facebook in order to protect users profits.

Will Facebook be able to have a successful business model without invading privacy? Explain your answer. Are they any measure Facebook could take to make this possible?

Facebook as a social networking website provides people with many kinds of advantages to communicate with others. Facebook target market based on their demographic information, hobbies, regions, and specified criteria in a comfortable and engaging environment. People can find their friends, see the updates of friends’ profiles, communicated with each other, and use different applications on it. Business model intends to generate revenue and profits. As more and more people register the site, the brand image is increasing. Based on the network effect, users do businesses on the site. Facebook was widespread fast among high schools, colleges and universities that provide an easy way to find friends. This made students want to join in it also because of narrow potential network with details in school activities. Facebook’s value and growth potential is determined by how effectively it can leverage the personal data is aggregated about its users to attract advertisers. Advertising is the mainly revenue of Facebook. Therefore, in my opinion, I don’t think Facebook will be able to have a successful model without invading privacy.