Facebook

FACEBOOK USERS: Is your profile information in safe hands?

Aristotle once said that man is a social animal by nature and necessity and today it still seems to hold ground as our very own social networking site Facebook has crossed 400 million active users mark. A list compiled by Google in April says that Facebook recorded maximum number of visitors as compared to any other website. Its share of total internet visit was a whopping 35.20 % of all internet visits. This just proves how socially active we are.

And the irony of the situation is that 31st May was quit Facebook day. Almost 23,845 people quit Facebook. It’s not even a drop in the vast Facebook Ocean. The people on the social networking website got alarmed when they came to know that personal information of the users was shared with third-party developers.

On Facebook there are various additional applications such as gaming and quizzes and these mainly work by accessing personal information from the profile of the users. It is really interesting to know that there are 950,000 developers in some 180 countries working for the games and quiz content development. Canada last year was instrumental in forcing Facebook to implement privacy safeguards. However, millions of people deleted their profile from Facebook as they were not sure whether Facebook implemented these said privacy safeguards or not. Canada Google even confirmed that “delete Facebook” and “deactivate Facebook” were the most searched words on World Wide Web. But here in India there are hardly few people who are aware of such security issues all because of low awareness levels about issues on privacy breach. Moreover, here in India we don’t have any stringent laws in place to safeguard privacy of personal information or intervene in case of security breaches.

The terms and conditions mentioned on the Facebook just before where we click “I AGREE” states it all but we don’t bother to read it. The safe way out for us in any social...