FACEBOOKCOM

Facebook is a social networking website. It was originally developed for college and university students but has since been made available to anyone with an email address. People can select to join one or more participating networks, such as a high school, place of employment, or geographic region.

As of February 2007, the website had the largest number of registered users among college-focused sites with over 19 million members worldwide (also from non-collegiate networks).

Facebook is the number one site for photos, ahead of public sites such as Flickr, with over 6 million photos uploaded daily, and is the sixth most visited site in the United States.

The name of the site refers to the paper facebooks that colleges and prepatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff depicting members of the campus community. Facebook is a social networking site.

Facebook Privacy concerns

There have been some concerns expressed regarding the use of Facebook as a means of surveillance and data mining. Theories have been written about the possible misuse of Facebook and privacy proponents have criticized the site's current privacy agreement.

According to the policy, "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 and other users of Facebook, to supplement your profile." However, some features—such as AIM away-message harvesting and campus newspaper monitoring-have been dropped and Facebook has since responded to the concerns.

Facebook has assured worried users the next privacy policy will not include the clause about information collection and has denied any data mining is being done "for the CIA or any other group." However, the possibility of data mining by private individuals unaffiliated with Facebook remains open, as evidenced by the fact that two MIT students were able to download, using an automated script, over 70,000 Facebook profiles from four schools (MIT, NYU, the University of Oklahoma, and Harvard) as part of a research project on Facebook privacy published on December 14th, 2005.

Wikipedia