Facebook can’t be trusted

Facebook+cant+be+trusted

Facebook is the poster child for unethical behavior from tech giants everywhere.

The site helped conduct a psychological study on its users this year by manipulating their news feeds. The company shifted the tones of its users’ news feeds by including either mostly positive or mostly negative posts in order to see how their mood would change.

All of this was done without asking for user permission, so perhaps you or I were a part of it. Only Facebook and its conspirators know.

The study was conducted on 689,000 users. Although this is a small number relative to the total number of Facebook users, it is still quite a large number. This study is flat-out immoral and puts Facebook among one of the creepiest and most Orwellian companies in the entire world.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, publically apologized last week for the “psychological experimentation.” However, her apology isn’t enough.

This study, conducted by Cornell University and the University of California, was manipulative and, frankly, strange. Facebook altered not only users’ friend content but also the flow of that content to make it seem more positive or more negative to individual users. The researchers found that the content users receive from friends can have a great effect on them emotionally.

It makes you wonder what Facebook’s purpose really is: social network or social manipulator?

Secondly, the study was discovered only when the Wall Street Journal found it outlined in some obscure academic journal. If this one almost slipped through the cracks, what else might have slipped through?

This is not the first time Facebook has done something unethical and anti-user.

Take its terms of service, for example. Not only do they state that Facebook has complete control over your content. They also state that if you don’t keep your profile up-to-date and accurate, Facebook reserves the right to delete your profile.

It is not comforting to know that it could delete our profiles when it wants and that we have no ownership of what we say and do within the site.

Facebook has also been involved in sharing information with governments, and it does so consistently. The company received more than 26,000 requests to access personal information from governments around the world. From those requests governments were able to access nearly 39,000 accounts, according to their own global government requests report.

Nearly 21,000 of those requests came from our own government. Considering recent problems with our government invading our privacy, it is disturbing to see this personal information being shared so openly.

With that many leaked accounts and requests for personal information, how can we trust the social-media giant?

As though it weren’t bad enough, information is also shared with private companies through your applications – not only the apps you grant permission but also the ones you don’t. The American Civil Liberties Union discovered this in 2009 when it made a Facebook quiz to see how much personal information it could access.

Last, but perhaps most worrying, is how hard it is to permanently delete your account. To truly wipe every last piece of personal information off Facebook requires much more than a click of the “deactivate” button.

This invasiveness is not uncommon on the internet, and Facebook isn’t the only company guilty of misusing people’s personal information. I’m looking at you, Google.

However, the recent study and other actions have made many people want to delete their Facebook accounts. I am not here to tell you to delete your account or to hate Facebook. I just want to inform people about its policies and its clearly unethical past and present.

What you do with your information is for you to decide. Just be aware of what Facebook may do with yours.