The Privacy Policy of Facebook

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an international non-profit digital rights advocacy and legal organization based in San Francisco, USA. It was founded in July 1990 by poet, essayist, cattle rancher and political activist John Perry Barlow and software developer, IT entrepreneur (Lotus, Second Life), investor and philantropst Mitchell Kapor. EFF is dedicated to civil rights in cyberspace and the medial self determination of its citizens. Even though the EFF mostly focusses on North America, a bureau has been opened in Brussels in Ferurary 2007 to better address European issues. Now EFF has documented the evolution of Facebook's privacy regulations during the previous five years (cf. Facebook's Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline): Since its incorporation just over five years ago, Facebook has undergone a remarkable transformation. When it started, it was a private space for communication with a group of your choice. Soon, it transformed into a platform where much of your information is public by default. Today, it has become a platform where you have no choice but to make certain information public, and this public information may be shared by Facebook with its partner websites and used to target ads. Since 2005 there has been a significant shift away from privacy, as becomes clear when comparing Facebook's 2005 Privacy Policy (FPP) with the most recent one: June 2005: No personal information that you submit to Thefacebook 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. April 2010: When you connect with an application or website it will have access to General Information about you. The term General Information includes your and your friends’ names, profile pictures, gender, user IDs, connections, and any content shared using the Everyone privacy setting. ... The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.” ... Because it takes two to connect, your privacy settings only control who can see the connection on your profile page. If you are uncomfortable with the connection being publicly available, you should consider removing (or not making) the connection. Consequently, Facebook originally earned its core base of users by offering them simple and powerful controls over their personal information. As Facebook grew larger and became more important, it could have chosen to maintain or improve those controls. Instead, it's slowly but surely helped itself — and its advertising and business partners — to more and more of its users' information, while limiting the users' options to control their own information. This shift in privacy policy almost perfectly corresponds to Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg's attitude towards this issue. Although Zuckerberg told users back in 2007 that privacy controls are "the vector around which Facebook operates", by January 2010 he had c…