To the 1.01 billion active users of Facebook, the website is a place to keep in touch with friends, share photos, and play games. To advertisers and marketers, however, Facebook is a massive management information system – an opportunity to collect information, preferences, and opinions from millions of users. How much of this happens with user consent, though?

Facebook has changed (read loosened) its privacy policies many times over the past years. In fact, the website no longer uses a privacy policy but instead prefers to refer to their user agreement as a data-use policy. The scandals don’t end there, however. Just over two years ago, Facebook’s implementation of the “Places” feature sparked controversy when the application’s default setting tracked the mobile location of users.

One of Facebook’s data centers, where all user information is stored

Although users are beginning to be much more conscious about privacy on Facebook, they cannot stop the company from recording and storing almost everything they have ever shared, including private messages. This, coupled with very recent proof of the company selling personal information to third parties, will have users thinking twice before posting anything on Facebook.

Picture Source: Facebook