Jessica Johnson
Matt Christensen
College Bound English
February 24, 2011
Of All Social Networks, Why Facebook?
At 26 years old, Mark Zuckerberg sits on a mountain of wealth, pronounced as the world’s youngest billionaire. In simple blue letters, a gray T-shirt proudly shows off the pedestal of which Mr. Zuckerberg proclaimed his fortune: Facebook. In recent years everything form individuals, to businesses, to politics, to law enforcements, have embraced the social network; but why? Today more than one in twelve people, ages twelve and up, around the world have a Facebook account. Numbers are growing everyday. At last count, six hundred million members have joined the popular membership, requiring only internet access and an email address. Six years since Facebook’s launching, it has reshaped not only the social networking industry, but many other important industries on the internet as well, some involving photography, gaming, and advertising.
Facebook holds the largest photo sharing website on the internet. By February of 2010, more than three billion photos were being uploaded on average, each month. What made Facebook photo albums so popular? The answer is obvious: the ability to “tag” people in their photos, and tag themselves in others. Facebook users love the photo sharing software, and its amplified use has connected people around the world.
The only concern I have for the awesome social connection are the suppressed downfalls. A new Zuckerberg product is in the lurking for launch-- Facial Recognition. Facebook always encourages members to tag others in photos. With Facial Recognition, automatic software looks for similar facial features in untagged photos, allowing users to quickly group photos in which past tagged people appear. Once any member is tagged through this software, new photos could be scanned or uploaded, and used to search for matches across the entire internet. When this software becomes readily available, people will be able to instantaneously find out about you through a single photo. This stretches from anyone from a creepy stranger in the mall, to a car salesman trying to get a pricey sale in his favor. People are what some call obsessed with the Facebook Fads, and overjoyed at Facebook renovation, celebrating Zuckerberg’s geniuses ideas through their statuses. John Mayer, a researcher at the Stanford Center believes “There’s so little transparency in what’s going on. We should be concerned about things like accidental social over-sharing, purposeful but unwanted social sharing, government overreacting, and security breaches”.
Capability to discover you on Facebook is brought to endless amounts of sources. The worldly social network is becoming the go to place for employers, college admissions offices, and lawyers to do background checks. Crime scene investigators are become a loyal member of the Facebook fan club as well. In the face-to-face world, agents cannot impersonate a suspect’s child, spouse, parent or best friend. In the online world of social networking, they can. The Facebook rules state that members cannot provide false information, or create an account for anyone other than themselves. While Twitter’s lawyers require a warrant or subpoena before the company turns over information, Facebook often cooperates with requests from government officials.
It is becoming a more and more common act for law enforcement agents to go undercover-- according to an internal Justice Department document obtained in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit-- with false online profiles to gather information, or communicate with suspects. There, they exchange messages with suspects, identify a target’s friends or relatives, check suspects’ alibis, and browse photos. Online photos often are used to link suspects or their friends to robberies or burglaries for suspicious spending spree hints, like pricy jewelry and cars. Because this tactic has spread from federal to local governments, they have even made a police system for monitoring the coordinates of online government activities to keep from counteractive activity from the two, known as deconfliction. Rocky Hill, Connecticut Police Department detective, Frank Dannahey, explains the situation best with this: “You could really mess up someone’s investigation because you’re investigating the same person and maybe doing things that are counterproductive to what another agency is doing.”
One of the most intuitive industries imposing on your profile, along side the government officials, is insurance companies. Investigators that used to follow suspicious cliental with cameras, now sit behind computer screens. Fishing through various databases has proved Facebook to be the biggest hook, reeling information in at a rate once believed to be impossible. Spokesman for the National Insurance Crime Bureau-- partnered with Insurance companies Allstate and State Farm-- Frank Scafidi, tells critics of this new technique “They look for things that don’t add up, like someone who claimed they hurt their back too badly to work and then bragged on Facebook about running a marathon.”
Some insurance companies may be sticking to this simple skim, yet dropped disability cases tell us otherwise. In Quebec Canada, thirty year old Natalie Blanchard took medical leave in early 2008 due to her struggling depression. Soon she began to receive disability benefits from insurer “Manulife Financial Corp”. One year later the payments halted without a single warning. When asked for an explanation, a representative of the insurance company informed her of her disability being dropped due to Facebook photos showing her enjoying time at a beach and drinking with friends at a local bar. This determined to Manulife that she was faking depression. Blanchard is now suing the company for failing to talk to her doctor and neglecting to inform her before cutting off payments. The case is scheduled for January of next year.
Most insurers agree that investigators would be negligent not to scan the popular social networking site for contradictions. Some studies, such as insurance consulter Celent’s study, “Leveraging Social Networks: An In-Depth View for Insurers”, suggest social networking data could be used to help price individual policies. The pricings would range from signs of high-risk behavior, to “liking” a cancer support group. Insurers plan on monitoring online profiles for reasons to deny claims or raise premiums. The early court cases have set the standard of the amount of information from profiles being used for debate. Through the simplest of jokes to writing things in jest to even old photos, insurance companies use everything. San Francisco’s Pillsbury and Levinson Law firm partner Vedica Puri warns “The situation is coming up more and more in court where lawyers for insurance companies lay traps for the insured based on pictures.” This may be an exquisite example of how society has not come to terms with how to manage never-before-had access, provided through a social network as personal as Facebook.
The misunderstanding of the American society’s slowly maturing mind to such a power ball player like Facebook may be Zuckerberg’s only downfall. After Instant Personalization was launched, reality pulled Zuckerberg off his high cloud of hopes and showed him what he now keeps in the front of his mind, with every new move he makes involving his site.
Instant Personalization was a sharing advancement meant to connect members on a whole new level: their whole web experience. If a user was logged into Facebook, and goes to other sites, their Facebook profile automatically displayed those sites. From their the profile was designed to become customized to promote content relevant to you and your friends. Zuckerberg believes this is “just the early stage.” For the past fifteen years every internet user has had the same experience. Facebook is transforming every log on into a web world where you are recognized for what is relevant to you. Zuckerberg’s ultimate goal is to move his Facebook personalization movement to everything media, including television. Insiders to the company have reported a Facebook television software, used to create a “news feed” of what your friends find popular to view, to suggest their television programs to you. Zuckerberg has already spread his “news feed” software to vehicles. There is no determining where his technology will stop. As awing as his social inventions may be, people generally do not welcome rapid change, and the Instant Personalization set portions of his members into protest. Weeks after its launch, critics, including US senators and privacy groups, called for Facebook to undo its rapid changes. The demonizing of the company was indeed the most difficult time for Facebook. The move made over one hundred front pages, showing the site just how important they had become. In response to protests, Facebook gave users more control of data in the following month. Though they had never seen such criticism, the backlash over privacy settings was a familiar pattern. Members have always resisted changes to service. Zuckerberg has resolved to making little changes to push further ahead. Privacy advocates and regulators are now demanding that the company proceed cautiously as it grows.
Along with pulling back his reins on plans for the future, Zuckerberg began to focus on fixing his image for the company. He began appearing on front pages, magazine covers, and made his first television appearance as a guest star of himself on the Simpson’s. Soon afterwards The Social Network took the box office by storm. The new movie-- describing the story of how Facebook came about-- created a new self-awareness in Zuckerberg.
Sense the downfall in Facebook and his new eye openings, Zuckerberg has become what can only be described by his closest friends as a philanthropist. The young executive has shown concern for human welfare and advancement in all movements. He has donated sums of money and generosity to other socially useful purposes. Zuckerberg’s biggest donation was announced when he appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show. One hundred million dollars went to troubled schools of Newark, New Jersey.
After the Facebook image was fixed, Zuckerberg began going back to work on industries, pulling the gaming industries back into sync. Before the privacy mess, in 2007 Facebook began allowing outside companies build simple applications and games. Zynga, the largest of social-gaming companies, took at leased $600 million dollars alone in 2010. Playfish, another huge Facebook game maker was bought a year before by Electronic Arts for $400 million. The third rival game maker, Playdom, was bought by Disney for $735 million. Today over two hundred million people play games through Facebook-- more than Playstation 3, Wii, and X-Box 360 combined. This simple statistic comes to show, people are always more engaged if their friends are involved.
Although the gaming industry is evolving into a social phenomenon, other industries are rethinking the gaming place on Facebook. Zuckerberg even admits, “The real distribution is going to come from the people who are rethinking these spaces”. Advertising companies have taken Facebook by storm, with over one-hundred-sixty-five advertising businesses literally revolving around the Facebook name. This is not the first time industries have thrown themselves at the almighty social network.
In 2007, three years after Facebook’s first launch, companies-- such as Yahoo, Microsoft and eBay-- began to seek partnership. Google attempted to invest in Facebook in 2007 as well, yet was beaten off by Microsoft. Ever since the total deny, Google and Facebook have encountered in a global race against one another, racing for internet domination. Google’s biggest fear is Facebook users will begin to search web primarily through their “likes”. What Google has discovered, along with Zuckerberg and Facebook faculty, is ultimately what Google thinks is important, has no importance to those socially eloped in their friends through Facebook. Bigger brands in advertising seem to have noticed the trend and are increasingly turning to Facebook for services, leaving Google in a trail of technological dust. At the moment Facebook over passed Google with their 500 million members last year, Google showed its desperation through failed projects. One dead Google attempt to make a comeback to Facebook’s miraculous lead was “Buzz”. Buzz was a social service, similar to the product Facebook first started out as, launched and killed in 2010. “GoogleMe” is the newest effort to get ahead of Facebook, though not many are optimistic in Google’s favor.
Facebook took the ultimate stab into the heart of Google executives recently, on February 22, by stealing their Latin American Google Vice President, Alexadre Hohagen. Hohagen was the one to help establish Google’s Latin American offices six years ago, causing his last position of vice president. It is no wonder Facebook snagged him when they could. Brazil is one of few large markets where Google’s social network, Orkut, is larger than Facebook’s. During a press release moments after the news shook the news shook the Internet, Hohagen relayed the ultimate goal of Facebook back to press, and brought reality to how much common sense Zuckerberg made in targeting the Latin American world.
“Millions of people in Latin America are using Facebook daily to connect and
share with their friends and families which is an integral part of the Latin
American culture.”
Google executives admit Facebook may be to them, what they were to Microsoft: a dominator in the internet battle for page views and popularity. Facebook has even taken way to Middle Eastern countries, over passing Google’s Orkut as well.
Early this year after protest rang out in Egypt against Hosni Mubarak, president of thirty years, Facebook was blocked. In great efforts to organize anti-government demonstrations, Facebook was turned to as the ultimate communication. Although the networking site was blocked, many Egyptians found ways around the firewall to keep on Facebook. Status updates kept the world in communication with the closed-off country. Soon videos began going up of group’s walls, one of which showed protesters jumping on an armed police vehicle trying to stop a water cannon. The world was on the protestors side, seeing everything from their Facebook point of view. Through Facebook people are connected, and with that connection, as insignificant as the small connection may be to their lives, that connection is more than Facebook users have with the government blocking out the Facebook website.