Facebook is very popular amongst genealogists with a very active genealogy section. However, the company's business methods have recently come under scrutiny and now five people have filed a suit against the company, charging the social-networking company with violating California privacy laws and false advertising.
Facebook users assume that personal information and photos that they post on the site are shared only with authorized friends. However, the latest lawsuit says, “Users may be unaware that data they submit ... may be extracted and then shared, stored, licensed or downloaded by other persons or third parties they have not expressly authorized,” the suit reads.
The suit describes at length a massive data mining operation at Facebook, which it says has transformed itself from a social-networking company to a data-mining company. It faults the company for collecting and analyzing site content without user knowledge or consent.
Facebook is involved with several other legal problems involving the company's cavalier attitude about its users' private information. Earlier this year it changed its terms of use to essentially claim perpetual ownership of all content loaded on the site. In response to a user uproar, it later omitted that portion of its terms of use.
The Privacy Commission of Canada recently said that Facebook doesn’t comply with Canada’s privacy laws. The Privacy Commission has suggested Canadian Internet providers should block access to Facebook until it corrects its problems.
You can find several thousand articles about Facebook's privacy problems if you start at http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&=&q=facebook+privacy+lawsuit&btnG=Google+Search.
If you are a Facebook user, do you know how much private information you have placed online?
