Facebook

Beacon
Main article: Facebook Beacon
Facebook announced Facebook Beacon on November 7, 2007, a marketing initiative that allows websites to publish a user's activities to their Facebook profile as "Social Ads" and promote products.[65] When launching Beacon, Facebook stated "no personally identifiable information is shared with an advertiser in creating a Social Ad", and that "Facebook users will only see Social Ads to the extent their friends are sharing information with them."[66] After Facebook was criticized for collecting more user information for advertisers than was previously stated, Zuckerberg publicly apologized on December 5, 2007 for the way Facebook launched Beacon, saying, "The problem with our initial approach of making it an opt-out system instead of opt-in was that if someone forgot to decline to share something, Beacon still went ahead and shared it with their friends."[67][68]

ConnectU
Divya Narendra, Cameron Winklevoss, and Tyler Winklevoss, owners of the social networking website HarvardConnection, changed its name to ConnectU in September 2004 and filed a lawsuit against Facebook, alleging Zuckerberg had illegally used source code intended for the website they asked him to build for them.[69][70] Facebook later requested the court case that ConnectU filed against them be dismissed, citing ConnectU's "broad brush allegations are unsupported by evidence". The case was dismissed by a United States federal judge.[71] ConnectU filed another lawsuit against Facebook on March 11, 2008, continuing the case; a resolution is still pending as of May 2008.[72]

Privacy
Several concerns have emerged regarding the use of Facebook as a means of surveillance and data mining.[73] Two MIT students were able to download over 70,000 Facebook profiles from four schools (MIT, New York University, the University of Oklahoma, and Harvard University) using an automated shell script, as part of a research project on Facebook privacy published on December 14, 2005.[74] The possibility of data mining remains open, as evidenced in May 2008, when the BBC technology program "Click" demonstrated that personal details of Facebook users and their friends could be stolen by submitting malicious applications.[75]

Privacy proponents have criticized the site's privacy agreement, which states: "We may use information about you that we collect from other sources, including but not limited to newspapers and Internet sources such as blogs, instant messaging services, Facebook Platform developers and other users of Facebook, to supplement your profile."[76] Another clause that received criticism concerned Facebook's right to sell a user's data to private companies, stating: "We may share your information with third parties, including responsible companies with which we have a relationship." This concern was addressed by Facebook spokesman Chris Hughes who said, "Simply put, we have never provided our users' information to third party companies, nor do we intend to."[77]

Concerns have also been raised regarding the difficulty of deleting user accounts. Previously, Facebook only allowed users to "deactivate" their accounts so that their profile was no longer visible. However, any information the user had entered into the website and on their profile remained on the website's servers. This outraged many users who wished to remove their accounts permanently, citing reasons such as the inability to erase "embarrassing or overly-personal online profiles from their student days as they entered the job market, for fear employers would locate the profiles".[78] Facebook changed its account deletion policies on February 29, 2008, allowing users to contact the website to request that their accounts be permanently deleted.[79]

Reception
Facebook has more than 80 million active users worldwide.[80][81] According to Alexa, the website's ranking among all websites increased from 60th to 7th in terms of traffic, from September 2006 to September 2007.[82] Quantcast ranks the website 16th in terms of traffic,[83] and Compete.com ranks it 20th.[84] The website is the most popular for uploading photos, with 14 million uploaded daily.[80] On November 3, 2007, there were seven thousand applications on Facebook, with another hundred created everyday.[85]

Facebook is the most popular social networking site in several English-speaking countries, including Canada[86] and the United Kingdom.[87] However, in the United States, it has only 36 million users compared to MySpace's 73 million.[88] The website has won awards such as placement into the "Top 100 Classic Websites" by PC Magazine in 2007,[89] and winning the "People's Voice Award" from the Webby Awards in 2008.[90] In a 2006 study conducted by Student Monitor, a New Jersey-based limited liability company specializing in research concerning the college student market, Facebook was named the second most popular thing among undergraduates, tied with beer and only ranked lower than the iPod.[91]