The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.This page is based on a presentation given in April 2018 by Robert Elphick. CONTENTS Amusing IntroductionTo others of my generation who still do not and cannot comprehend why Facebook even exists, here's what I'm doing to gain a better understanding: I am trying to make new friends without using Facebook, but applying the same principles. Every day I walk down the street and tell passers-by what I have eaten, how I feel at the moment, what I have done the night before, what I will do later, and with whom. I give them pictures of my family, my dog, and of me gardening, taking things apart in the garage, watering the lawn, standing in front of landmarks, driving around town, having lunch, and doing what anybody and everybody does every day. I also listen to their conversations, then give them the "thumbs up" and tell them I like them. And it works! I already have four people following me: Two police officers, a private investigator, and a psychiatrist! DefinitionAccording to Wikipedia (April 2018): 
Facebook is an American online social media and social networking service company based in Menlo Park, California. Its website was launched on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg, along with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. The founders initially limited the website's membership to Harvard students. Later they expanded it to higher education institutions in the Boston area, the Ivy League schools, and Stanford University. Facebook gradually added support for students at various other universities, and eventually to high school students. Since 2006, anyone who claims to be at least 13 years old has been allowed to become a registered user of Facebook, though variations exist in this requirement, depending on local laws. The name comes from the face book directories often given to American university students. Facebook held its initial public offering (IPO) in February 2012, and began selling stock to the public three months later, reaching an original peak market capitalization of $104 billion, a new record. Facebook makes most of its revenue from advertisements that appear onscreen. Facebook can be accessed from a large range of devices with Internet connectivity, such as desktop computers, laptops and tablet computers, and smartphones. After registering, users can create a customized profile indicating their name, occupation, schools attended and so on. Users can add other users as "friends", exchange messages, post status updates, share photos, videos and links, use various software applications ("apps"), and receive notifications of other users' activity. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups organized by workplace, school, hobbies or other topics, and categorize their friends into lists such as "People From Work" or "Close Friends". Additionally, users can report or block unpleasant people. Facebook has more than 2.2 billion monthly active users as of January 2018. Its popularity has led to prominent media coverage for the company, including significant scrutiny over privacy and the psychological effects it has on users. In recent years, the company has faced intense pressure over the amount of fake news, hate speech and depictions of violence prevalent on its services, all of which it is attempting to counteract.  Sign in page Facebook has revenues over $40 billion at this writing. It's revenue is said to come from advertising. A facebook account provides the opportunity to put information about the account holder into the account. Most of the data supplied is in the form of text and pictures. Users can then link to other users by "friending" them and so forming a social connection between them. Users are encourage to have as many "friends" as possible thus forming a wide social network of people able to share information, thoughts, experiences, pictures, etc. All this information is held in giant databases owned by Facebook.  Home page of a new user  Users Page After some pictures and text have been added. Note the encouragement to add new "friends" with suggestions of people you may know. In the picture above you will notice that Facebook suggest people that you might know to add to your "friends". How do they decide who you might know? Could it be that they are reading all your data? Analyzing your pictures?  Welcome Page The Welcome page (above) also suggests people to add to your "friends". In this example the user had no idea who any of these suggestions were. How do they decide who to show?  Extended page The left column after being expanded with "see more" option. This list shows a number of possible actions that the user can engage. Originally they were probably meant to be useful to the users for their convenience.  Discover People After choosing Discover People from the left hand column, the page above was presented. However did Facebook choose to show these pictures? Why would the user find them interesting? Are they using my picture like this? Did they get permission?  Menu Bar The menu bar on most of the Facebook web pages include a number of functions. Above, the arrow menu includes important settings, preferences and the Log Out option. Note also the push to add "friends" from a set of pictures of people you have never heard of! PrivacyFacebook claims that users can protect their data by allowing the user to decide who can see the data. For each data element (photo, video, activity, event, text, etc.) the user can select from a number of options as to who can see the element. Below is an example for a new posting to be generated.  Privacy selection for a posting element. There are, however, reports that data elements that are suposed to be private are being given to advertisers and being sold to data analysts. Facebook also claim that whenever a user deletes data from their account it is also completely erased from their data bases. There are however reports that deleted data elements persist in the data bases and can be found by requesting a complete set of user data from Facebook. An example of this was shown during the presentation of April 2018. See also the Further Reading section below. Facebook policy includes: When does Facebook get data about people from other websites and apps?
When you visit a site or app that uses Facebook services, they receive information even if you're logged out or don't have a Facebook account. This is because other apps and sites don't know who is using Facebook. Recently it has been revealed that Facebook sold data on millions of users and non-users to Cambridge Analitica, a company hired to advise a political party how to influence voters in the American Presidential Elections of 2016. Apparently most of these users did not consent to this sale. To see if you were affected try going to bit.ly/2uXuHOY. Although we should all have paid more attention to the terms and condition provided by Facebook and others, we probably would not have had the time. A study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in 2012 found that it would take the average person 76 days to read all of the privacy policies that they see each year. So glossing over them has become a necessity. Further Reading and referencesHere are a selection of recent articles on Facebook:
Delete Your Facebook AccountBefore deleting your Facebook account, you might want to download a copy of your personal data that was stored on the Site. You can find Facebooks instructions to download your Facebook data here if interested. If you don't download your personal data, then it will not be available to you after you have deleted the account.
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