Legal Policies and Ethics

I want to focus on lawsuits made against Facebook. Anyone who has seen “The Social Network” knows about the biggest lawsuit against the company. The Winklevoss twins sued Mark Zuckerburg for allegedly stealing their idea to create a cool social network while they were studying at Harvard together. Although that is the most publicized story, I wanted to explore what concerns or issues users have had with the site.

I found an interesting story about David Fagin. Fagin is a Facebook user and a musician. He uses Facebook as a networking tool to promote his music. As a result he added a lot of friends, mostly using the “suggested friends” tab. One day he added too many people and Facebook tagged him as a spammer and suspended him for 7 days from adding new people. They also threatened to delete his account. Fagin’s biggest issue was that there was no where he could go to explain his case and petition being removed from the spammer list. The only place he was referred was the standard FAQ page.

Fagin wrote a blog post that went mini viral, but enough to catch the attention of a lawyer. Together they decided to sue Facebook for $1.00. The lawsuit was more of a media campaign than anything else. Fagin wanted to know what public feedback would be on the issue of Facebook lacking a support department.

I honestly think that Fagin enjoyed being in the spotlight more than he actually cared about Facebook’s lack of support. The campaign was successful in getting his name out there.

http://socialtimes.com/user-files-1-00-lawsuit-against-facebook_b59511

http://www.aolnews.com/2011/02/16/opinion-thanks-to-facebook-i-m-now-a-spammer/

http://videos.webpronews.com/2011/04/facebook-calls-man-spammer-and-gets-sued/

Another case I found was about a group of Facebook users out of California that were suing Facebook for allegedly storing information that would infringe on people’s privacy. The group accused Facebook of storing information about people based on the things that they “like” on their profiles and selling that information for marketing purposes. There is little evidence to support their claim but Facebook is being investigated. The group made their claim after finding that their computers web history had a unique way to cache information when they hit the “like” button.

The question is; is it a problem if Facebook is sending marketing people information about the things we “like” to produce more relevant advertisements? I don’t think it matters that much. If you think about it, whenever we “like” a business or whatever it may be, we are basically requesting information about it. Why not receive other relevant information. Facebook has never been overbearing with advertisements, so I don’t mind. The hard truth is that there are 2.5 million businesses that have the “like” button incorporated into their websites with 10,000 more adding it every day. Maybe there is something out there you may be interested in, but without some kind of interest tracking it will never be visible to you.

http://newsandinsight.thomsonreuters.com/California/News/2011/05_-_May/Facebook_sued_for_using__Like__button_to_track_online_activity/

Here are some other articles about cases that I don’t really want to write about.

http://www.neowin.net/news/lawsuits-filed-against-facebook-for-violating-federal-law

https://www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs9-wrtp.htm

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20113958-93/chicago-company-sues-facebook-over-timeline-feature/

http://jonathanturley.org/2011/10/12/georgia-court-rules-against-teacher-who-lost-job-after-posting-facebook-pictures-drinking-in-europe/

Organizational Uses

I have always thought that Facebook could be a useful way to communicate between an organizations hierarchy and its lower level employees. The problem arises with concerns about privacy. Your Facebook profile is out there for the world to see, but of course there are people that you don’t want to allow access to that window into your life. The idea of using Facebook as a communication tool is valid. However, I would never want to be friends with my current boss. Luckily there are other avenues that are more for a professional setting.

One of my favorite and most useful sites that I have found is Dropbox.com. “Dropbox, a free service that lets people bring their documents, photos and videos everywhere and share them easily. More than 45 million people already depend on Dropbox” (http://www.dropbox.com/press/20111027). One of the companies I work for uses drop box to share every document needed to run and organize a branch of the business from anywhere. Our Dropbox contains documents, contracts, tutorials, pictures and training materials. I have found it incredibly useful to have all of that information at my fingertips. Dropbox saves a lot of the hassle of forwarding and sharing documents and provides more privacy than using Gmail. Dropbox is easy to use and if you have an iPad, you can carry your whole document library wherever you go.

Dropbox was created by Drew Houston. He has an interesting story. Houston created one of the fastest growing websites out there. When the website first started gaining popularity, it caught the attention of Steve Jobs who offered to buy the website for an obscene amount of money. I admire Houston for not selling out. He was determined to create a large business out of Dropbox. Dropbox has around 50 million users and another joins every second. (http://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriabarret/2011/10/18/dropbox-the-inside-story-of-techs-hottest-startup/)