Why does Facebook Interfere in private lives of users?

The complaints about the defects of this service leading to the leak of the users’ personal data are a new reminder of the suspicions concerning the possible cooperation of the Facebook’s leadership with both the government and corporations. More from our observer Vladimir Gladkov.

FIRST: The Facebook website, created in 2004 as a social networking service for the students of Harvard University, over the past years has made a breakthrough to turn it into one of the most popular Internet-services in the world, thus, making one of its founding fathers, Mark Zuckerberg, the world’s youngest billionaire . Several weeks ago Facebook overcame another frontier, when it registered the appearance of a billionth user.

It seems though that the company has another problem which is equally important - the discontent of the users that is growing fast. The latter suspect that their confidential data as well as their correspondence regularly become known to third parties.

Although such rumours have been circulating for a long time now, the company’s leadership had to acknowledge that some of them were true. For example, this system can scan the personal reports of users for further references, as was demonstrated to Polish programmers. Besides, a disruption that occurred in the website’s mechanism last month resulted in the fact that personal reports appeared on the users’ pages, which immediately made them accessible to everybody. However, such incidents seem to be harmless amid accusations of cooperation with special services and the sale of the users’ personal data to corporations that were brought against the company.

The fact the US government is successfully using Facebook and all other Internet services for collecting information about the users has not been a secret for anybody for a long time now. CIA representatives who have openly acknowledged the existence of the so-called Open Source Center are carefully studying the pages of both foreign citizens and their compatriots. Some of the company’s supporters have repeatedly tried to show that it had fallen victim to the pressure on the government’s part but still, the fact remains that Facebook has more than once grossly violated its own promises concerning the safeguarding of the security of confidential information. Facebook often forgot its commitment not to share the information about the users with third parties, including advertising companies. Facebook’s leadership often changed the structure of the website without any warning as a result of which part of secret information became accessible to everybody. As a sign of protest, the users held various actions, including “Quit Facebook Day” that was held in 2010.

And even if all accusations of cooperation with the government and big business prove to be only words, one should remember just the same that the government is stubbornly seeking to get a legal access to information provided by social networks. One of the examples is the fight for the adoption of the SOPA and CISPA laws, aimed at doing away with piracy and terrorism, which actually give special services and corporations a full control over information about the Internet users. All this is new evidence of the fact that the protection of personal data in the world electronic network is none other than a dangerous myth.