Last week, many of those on Facebook would have seen status updates from their friends declaring their ‘copyright’ over personal data on the social networking site. The semi-outrage on Facebook with users claiming right to ‘own’ their content is entirely unnecessary. Fact is, Facebook is a corporation and it wants you to continue to use its services. In return, it owns your data. This recent ‘copyright’ hoax is reminiscent of the “repost or Facebook will deactivate your account because they have reached capacity” scare.
Roshni Abbas, a Facebook user in Ahmedabad, saw the message circulating and reposted the ‘copyright declaration’ on her Facebook profile. But she soon deleted the same. “A friend of mine directed me to a news website that said it was a hoax message, and, so, I quickly deleted the status update from my Facebook profile,” she admits.
Facebook has more than a billion registered users and 60 million users log on to the site in India alone (as per data from SocialBakers.com). Accessed by over 66 per cent of 100 million internet population in India, Facebook sure has a lot of data on its servers from India.
A check on Facebook’s data usage policy reveals how it uses data. “We provide data to our advertising partners or customers after we have removed the user’s name or any other personally identifying information, or have combined it with other people's data in a way that it is no longer associated with the user,” Facebook claims. With majority of Facebook users having never read its data usage document (available on its website) that runs into 16 pages, it explains why such status update hoax go viral on the site at regular intervals.
What is private and what’s public on Facebook
While creating a Facebook account, users enter details such as name, gender and network (eg, your school or company). That information, along with the user’s profile and cover photos, are always publicly available, no matter what. Further, Facebook also privately stores an user’s activities within its platform. This includes commenting or sending messages, check-ins, Page likes and other activities are recorded too. This information is used to tailor an user’s experience on the site. For example, the friends you interact with most are likely to be featured prominently in your News Feed or topics of interest are highlighted by sponsored sections or advertisements.
Recently, the social networking giant proposed scrapping a four-year old process that allowed users to vote on changes to its policies and terms of service. Earlier, if 7,000 comments were made on a proposed change to the site’s service, it triggered a vote by users who could strike down unpopular site policies.
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While Facebook didn't make its policy changes a secret, it also did nothing to bring it to users' attention.
Facebook is now proposing that it may share information between its own service and other businesses that it owns to “help provide, understand, and improve our services and their own services”. Facebook is talking about Instagram, a photo-sharing service for smartphone users that it bought in April last year. For example, Facebook users posting and tagging photos of desired items on Instagram could find the same products advertised back to them on the social network and potentially, elsewhere on the web.
“It’s really scary how every time I upload a picture from a certain location on Facebook or discuss a product’s service on Facebook on its brand pages, I am served the same kind of ads on my Facebook page — on mobile, on tablet and on the PC,” says Sumeet Harwalkar, who claims he has seen a steady rise in targeted ads based on his personal conversations on Facebook.
Now, the social networking giant is also batting to eliminate the “who can send you Facebook messages” feature, a setting that allows users to control who can contact them through the social network. This change could lead to users receiving increasing amounts of spam, argue privacy advocates. In January, Google too announced it would combine users’ personal information from its various web services, such as search, email and the Google+ social network, to provide a more customised experience.
The bottomline is that users need to be more aware of their data rights and review privacy settings on Facebook (or on Google sites) regularly. If they feel that personal data is being misused in some way, contacting Facebook itself is much more productive than posting a status.