Criticism of Facebook
Facebook’s growth as an Internet social net-
working site has met criticism, on a range of
issues including the privacy of users and un-
moderated content affecting advertising.
Privacy concerns
Issues during 2007
In August 2007, the code used to dynamically
generate Facebook’s home and search page
as visitors browse the site was accidentally
made public, according to leading internet
news sites.[1][2] A configuration problem on a
Facebook server caused the PHP code to be
displayed instead of the web page the code
should have created, raising concerns about
how secure private data on the site was. A
visitor to the site copied, published and later
removed the code from his web forum, claim-
ing he had been served legal notice by Face-
book.[3] Facebook’s response was quoted by
the site that broke the story:[4]
“ A small fraction of the code that dis-
plays Facebook web pages was ex-
posed to a small number of users due
to a single misconfigured web server
that was fixed immediately. It was
not a security breach and did not
compromise user data in any way.
Because the code that was released
powers only Facebook user interface,
it offers no useful insight into the in-
ner workings of Facebook. The re-
printing of this code violates several
laws and we ask that people not dis-
tribute it further.
”
In November 2007, Facebook
launched
Beacon, a system where third-party websites
can include a script by Facebook on their
sites, and use it to send information about
the actions of Facebook users on their site to
Facebook, prompting serious privacy con-
cerns. Information such as purchases made
and games played are published in the user’s
news feed. An informative notice about this
action appears on the third party site and
gives the user the opportunity to cancel it,
and the user can also cancel it on Facebook.
Originally if no action was taken, the inform-
ation was automatically
published. On
November 29 this was changed to require
confirmation from the user before publishing
each story gathered by