History of Facebook
Facebook is a social networking website in which users can post comments, share photographs and post links to news or other interesting content on the web, chat live, and watch short-form video.
Facebook started in February of 2004 as a school-based social network at Harvard University. It was started by Mark Zuckerberg and Edward Saverin, both students at the college. It was until 2006 that Facebook opened to anyone 13 years or older and took off, rapidly overtaking My Space as the most popular social network in the world.
Facebook’s success can be credited to its ability to appeal to both people and businesses and its ability to interact with sites around the web by providing a single login that works across multiple sites. Facebook is user-friendly and open to everyone. Even the least technical-minded people can sign up and start posting on Facebook It is the one of the important features which made Facebook a great success. It was started to keep in touch and reconnect with lost friends.
You can connect to them sitting anywhere in the world . There are some other things that you can do with Facebook you can play games across the internet, you can tell which book you are reading now, you can rate films and get opinions. You can join groups with people of similar interests, you can join Facebook groups that represent your favourite TV and radio programmes and chat to like-minded people about them.
It also provide a lot of entertainment for the users . Facebook has more than two billions monthly active users as of January 2018. Facebook earn its major revenue through advertisement like pop ups, display ads, active advertising etc. It also provides its users to choose their own privacy settings. The users can add other friends, share photo, exchange photos, links , videos and also post statues updates.
Facebook announced that it had reached two million active advertisers with most of the gain coming from small businesses. An active advertiser is an advertiser that has advertised on the Facebook platform in the last twenty eight days.
Data from millions of Facebook users who used My personality app, including their answers to intimate questionnaires, was left exposed online for anyone to access, a New Scientist investigation has found.
University of Cambridge distributed personality quiz application My personality to hundreds of users through website without proper security.
The data was so sensitive which revealed personal details of Facebook users. Facebook removed My Personality from its platform on saying that the application has violated its policies. More than 6 Million people completed the test and nearly half of them agreed to share data from their Facebook profile. All of this data was then scooped up and the names removed before it was put on a website to share with other researchers.
Each user was given unique id, which includes data such as age, gender, location statues updates and also result of personality test. This process could be automated, quickly revealing the identities of the millions of people in the data sets, and tying them to the results of intimate personality tests.
It’s one of the largest data leak in social networking history. The breech allowed the company to exploit the private social media activity of a huge swath of the American electorate, developing techniques that underpinned its work on President Trump’s campaign in 2016.
Founder Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook is trying to improve its security features. Facebook in response to governments notice admitted that more than 330 users in India had installed the personality quiz app which results in their personal information leak.
The Facebook users will get a message at the top of their news feed. And when your data is misused, Facebook will direct you to its Help centre which help you to know how your data have been misused.
As Facebook provide each users a platform to connect with their friends and also it provide users with entertainment which resulted in a large number of users. Facebook contain the details of their users and also it has the responsibility to keep the data of the users confidential.
Political organization used information from the data for the personal needs and interest. By allowing the users to publish material by themselves, it comes under scrutiny for the amount of freedom it give to the users which include intellectual property and copyright.
Facebook has been banned by some of the countries like Syria, China and Iran. In response to the reports from media the information commission of UK issued a warrant to search company’s server. And as a result Facebook banned Cambridge Analytica from advertising on Facebook.
They should provide their users with a promise that the all users’ information will be confidential, and also they should take necessary steps to solve the current issue . They should also make sure that this kind of situation will not happen anymore. They should give regular updates when the users account password get expired, change for user ID number.
As this is one of the biggest data leak ever in the history of social networking sites . They should be more careful regarding the information of the users and if again such kind of situation occur again there will be huge decline in the number of users who will using Facebook and the people will think that there is no security for the users in Facebook and also they will think that if they continue to use Facebook their personal information will be disclosed.
The authorities should also promise that these kind of situation will not occur again and also authorities should try to regain the users trust. And also they should determine who accessed my personality app and for what reason they have accessed the information and for what purpose they have used it.
