Facebook’s privacy practices have always been controversial. It doesn’t charge its users–because its users are the product. The company sells information on its users, their social networks, services they like, and a multitude of other forms of information to advertisers and marketers. This gives Facebook a strong incentive to push privacy boundaries constantly, since the more personal information Facebook gathers on its users, the more money Facebook will be able to make by selling this information on to marketers.
This has meant, for example, that Facebook has frequently changed its privacy policies, often in confusing ways. Jennifer Shore and Jill Steinman, two undergraduate students at Harvard have just published a new research article in Technology Science showing that, over time, these changes have led to Facebook’s privacy policy becoming much, much worse.
Shore and Steinman compare different versions of Facebook’s privacy policy from 2005 to 2015 (with some missing data in 2011 and 2012), using a standard set of measures of privacy policy. This graph shows how its quality has changed over time (scored out of a possible 100; the underlying data are available here).
Facebook privacy policy rating over time as a percentage of the best possible score. Dots highlight dates of a policy heavily criticized by advocacy groups (A) and the next revision (B). Gap identifies missing archived policies. Used with permission of Technology Science
Facebook starts off with a reasonably tolerable set of privacy policies, which get better in the early years, but then decline sharply.
Read the full piece at The Washington Post.
- Publication Type:Other Writing
- Publication Date:08/18/2015