July 28, 2010 by Andre
Facebook has long hit the news for its controversial approach to online data privacy, with many people criticising the application for abusing users’ personal information. Earlier this month, Facebook came under fire by German officials, following claims that the social networking giants has gathered personal information from non-Facebook subscribers.
Data protection officials commenced legal proceedings against the company, in action that could result in thousands of Euros in fines being levied against them. Swiss officials are also considering action against them.
With 500 million users and an estimated value of well over 6 billion pounds, Facebook is the acknowledged king of social networking. Despite the popularity of the site, earlier this year over 40,000 people pledged to leave the site over privacy concerns. A sociologist from Lausanne University, Olivier Glassey, has issued a statement suggesting that Facebook’s popularity will continue to decline, unless the company does something radical to change their approach to users’ data and personal information.
Olivier Glassey stated: “We are providing a lot of information and we do not know how this information is used by them or even what kind of information Facebook is processing and how. So maybe a better balance between given and received information will be a point to work on in the future for the user and for Facebook.”
A second social expert has backed up the claims, stating: “People understood that their privacy was at risk and therefore they will falsify the information. It is what sociologists call projecting your life. You start to manipulate the data, you start to make things better, you start to put out only selected pictures of yourself, because you know that the pictures are going to circulate.”
“So what we see right now is that social networks are less and less a representation of our life as it really is. It is more what we want others to think our life is, which is a very, very big difference.”
With the growing concerns over Facebook’s use of data, the future could see a mass exodus of users to more secure sites, and the popular networking service diminishing in popularity over time.
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