Suing for privacy

 

What Facebook actually does with the information you provide can be very hard to determine. For years, Facebook’s privacy policy has been a moving target, with updates and changes sometimes occurring every few months. A series of initiatives—including the program Beacon, which shared your behavior on third-party sites with Facebook—launched with no choice to opt-out, or with confusing or hidden configuration options.

The history of Facebook is a morass of criticisms and lawsuits over privacy issues and intellectual property. Some corporations and countries have banned the site as a security risk, while others use it to spy on their employees and citizens. A look into the history of the company, and the number of complaints that have been raised against it and some of its principal executives, should lead any reasonable person to have some serious ethical questions.

Actual statistics are tough to come by, but by all accounts, criminals flock to Facebook and other social networks. Blackmail, murder, suicide, confidence games, false representation, stalking, bullying—all of these things can and do happen. When you open yourself up online, someone will always be waiting to punish you for it, either by taking advantage of you or psychologically brutalizing you.