It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted.

Paper Title

-- By HeatherStevenson - 11 Nov 2009

THIS PAPER IS NOT READY FOR REVIEW

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The Perceived Problem

According to Facebook's own statistics, the social network has more than 300 Million "active users." Users upload over 2 billion photos and 14 million videos each month. Given the enormous amounts of data published on Facebook, the stories of careers ruined, relationship destroyed, and other public humiliations that have occurred when information was intentionally shared, but inadvertently made accessible to the wrong person, are hardly surprising. Running a google search for the term "facebook privacy" links to articles such as "10 Solid Tips to Safeguard Your Facebook Privacy,"which provides suggestions on how to prevent your pictures from appearing in advertisements and ensure that only the friends who you designate use Facebook to view your photos. Still, it seems to me that these suggestion, as well as the aforementioned Facebook-related disasters are only a small piece of a much more complex issue. "Privacy" in the sense of preventing a boss, parent, or other superior from seeing a photo of a Facebook-user engaged in activities that he believes only the people present will ever see, can be easily protected. Don't post embarassing photos. Don't "friend" people who are not actually your friend (or if you feel that you must, at least create a friend list of "friends" from whom you hide your pictures, wall, etc. The public conversation about Facebook and privacy has focused on the wrong problem.

The Serious, But Less Obvious Problem

The real danger is the less obvious one – that by partnering with various other companies, Facebook will learn so much about its users that "privacy"; becomes a thing of the past. Because users voluntarily share so much information with Facebook, and because there might initially seem to be some convenient reasons for allowing other sites to link to Facebook, Facebook has great potential to destroy what’s left of our private lives. If a graduate student can re-identify "anonymous" medical records using only voter registration records, what can a company like Facebook do?

It could know where and when a user goes out for a run, which high school seniors schools in the NCAA are recruiting, every action that a user makes while onAmazon,

One Possible "Solution"

The easiest answer to the problem of the people at Facebook having access to every aspect of our private lives is the same as the easiest solution to the problem of embarrassing photos falling into the wrong hands - get off Facebook. However, given that millions of users continue to post personal information on Facebook each day, another solution is necessary.

I would propose a legislative solution whereby Facebook is prohibited from providing information to or receiving information from other websites about its users.

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