Facebook case study analysis e-commerce

1. Facebook & the Age of Privacy
Case Study
MRKT-511
HELAL AL-HELAL PHD

2. • DO WE REALLY LIKE THE BUTTON ?!

4. Executive Summary
• Mark Zuckerberg the founder of Facebook had one main goal for
the people who are no longer worries about sharing their lives
with the world.
• The point of this goal is to make the world a more open and
connected place.
• The less privacy Facebook’s users want or have, the more
Facebook profits.

5. Case Issues
• The privacy of Facebook had almost shaped the privacy standard and policies in the
internet.
• Facebook privacy policy in 2004 promised the user’s to have nearly a full control over
who can and can’t see their personal profile.
• The LIKE button was introduced in 2009 and in 2011 Facebook extended the Likes
through the sponsored sits and advertisement.
• In 2012 Facebook went Public with huge pressure to justify the high stock price! Which
means trying to generate more profits.
• In 2014 made an enhancement to the mobile app that allows the app to recognize the
music and the television shows for advertisements purposes.

6. Facebook Privacy Changes History
2007
• Beacon program, designed to broadcast users’ activities and terminated in 2009. Facebook paid $9.5
million.
2009
• Facebook decided that it would publish users’ basic personal information on the public internet “trying to
take permanent control of user information”. Also introduced the LIKE button.
2010
• Extending LIKE button to third party Web sites to alert Facebook users to their friends’.
2011
• Facebook began publicizing users’ “Likes” of various advertisers in sponsored stories including user name,
profile picture without their explicit consent. Also enrolled all subscribers into its facial recognition
program without notice.
2012
• Under pressure from European regulators, Facebook promised not to use the Tag suggestion feature, which
allows photos to be automatically matched with particular users.
2013
• Facebook agreed with large data marketing companies to target users with specific Ads and introducing
searchable hashtags. Another lawsuit against Facebook for violating users privacy by scanning users private
Facebook messages.
2014
• Facebook finally recognized the fact that its future growth might depend on users’ feeling more confident
that they are sharing information only with those they want.

7. Questions & Answers
1. Why are social network sites interested in collecting user
information?
Like any company, Collecting personal data, exploited or not, is
attractive nowadays because of the potential value of these
intangible assets. Which is an important asset in case of Facebook
or any other social network that generates huge profits.

8. Questions & Answers
2. What types of privacy invasion are described in the case?
Which is the most privacy-invading, and why?
The most privacy invading was the profile information, face
recognition, pictures, locations that is being sold to the
advertisement and marketing companies

9. Questions & Answers
3. Is e-commerce any different than traditional markets with
respect to privacy? Don’t merchants always want to know their
customer?
It is different in different ways i.e. geographically, sociality, e-
commerce is more advanced up to date always upgrading toward
reaching new niche and market share. Where old-fashioned phone
calls surveys, in street surveys, questioners are not useful enough.
Massive raw data is needed to get well studied ‘n analyzed
transferring it to useful readings (customer’s behavior, pattern …
etc.)

10. Questions & Answers
4. Do consumers in a public marketplace have a legitimate expectation
of privacy? Is there anything consumers can do to protect their
privacy on the web? Can the Web be designed to better protect
privacy?
• It depends on the consumer concept of privacy, some of them sees it as
a major problem to give any personal information’s and that they have
the legal rights for the market to kept it private for others it is a
normal thing to have their information out in public and reachable.
• Yes, the consumers can protect their privacy in the web by reading the
web privacy policy in thorough before accepting the conditions and to
try not to post or writ private information’s and photos.
• The user is the one to decide what to share, write, post.

11. Recommendations
• We recommend the users to be more careful with the sites they
use to post their private information in and to decrease the
number of private photos that they post.
• Legislation of personal data base Taxation.
• Alert Buttons or icons for using a user’s information with a
conformation.
• For the web sites they should make more private sits that would
assure the users that there will not be any leak of their private
information.

12. Conclusion
• The massive demand for data will keep social networks to grow
up and up.
• All in all it’s the user choice to CLICK.

13. The End …
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