Jesus Gonzalez
The purpose of this blog is to give our experiences on a research project that tested the privacy policy of Facebook. We split up our group of 7 people into three different groups: 2 people kept their Facebook account as a control group, 3 people deactivated their account for as long as they could, and lastly 2 people deleted their fake Facebook accounts. We decided to have a research project on the Facebook privacy policy when we were discussing how some people were able to log onto their Facebook accounts after deleting their account and all of their stuff were still searchable, which shouldn’t happen when an account is deleted. The research question that we tried to answer with this project was: “Does Facebook follow its own privacy policy when accounts are deleted and deactivated?” I was one of the two that was allowed to keep their Facebook and we were all required to keep a daily log in order to see Facebook is part of our life whether we kept it, deleted it, or deactivated it.
My Annotated Bibliography is together with the main bibliography shown in the main page. Link to Annotated Bibliography
As a group we chose to report our own experiences in a daily log on our Facebook activity or the absence of Facebook. This was the best way to do our research because it was hard to find other research on this and it was easy to just write our own experiences and analyze them. Each group member did their own log for how ever much time they thought was appropriate. Below is my log for a week starting form 3/6/12-3/13/12:
3/6/12: The first day of our research project. I was one of the two that had to keep my Facebook as the control group. Everything is relatively normal; I went of Facebook about 10-15 times on my laptop and went on about the same amount of time on my cell phone using the Facebook application.
3/7/12: The second day of the research project. Everything is normal, I am able to go on Facebook and communicate with my friends from back home. I got an email from one of my group members saying that her Spotify account wasn’t working because Spotify creates an account through Facebook. I thought that was interesting because it shows how intertwined Facebook is with other popular applications we use.
3/8/12: The third day of research project. Went to the Facebook group meeting and discussed with my group members. Most group members were complaining about how they missed Facebook, how they had strange urges to post random things, and how they weren’t able to use some programs because they needed to create an account through Facebook. It was weird seeing how those who deleted or deactivated their Facebook are struggling with out Facebook.
3/9/12: Fourth day. Didn’t really use Facebook that much because I had to go to work and then spent some time with my friends; but I did check it about 3-5 time on my phone just to see what was going on that night.
3/10/12: Fifth day. Pretty normal day, checked Facebook about 15-20 times and listened to music on Spotify through my account created through Facebook.
3/11/12: Sixth day. Listened to Spotify a lot during the day again. Created an NCAA Basketball on Yahoo but I had to login in through my Facebook account. Also used Facebook to invite my friends to create their own NCAA brackets.
3/12/12: Seventh day. Facebook was a huge distraction while writing my Spanish reflection paper. This as probably the only day that I was jealous of those who had deleted or deactivated their Facebook. Went on about 30 times today; most of them because I was already on my laptop writing my paper and it was so easy to get distracted.
3/13/12: Eighth day. This was the last day that I am recording my Facebook activities. I went on about 15-20 times while doing homework online because it was so easy to just open up a new tab for Facebook. Facebook was really distracting this day, but once I was done with my homework I was able to use Facebook to talk to my friends from Los Angeles.
This project made me realize how dependent our society has become with not only Facebook, but with the Internet. I was one of the two in our group that was able to keep their Facebook as a control group, while there was a group of three people that deactivated and another two that deleted fake Facebook accounts to test out the privacy of Facebook. Even though I didn’t have to deactivate or delete my Facebook I was able to see how dependent I have become with this online social network. Like shown in my daily journal I would approximately go on Facebook about 10-15 times a day; whether I was using the Facebook application on my phone or using the actual website through my laptop. Half of the time that I went on was because I was doing homework online or on my laptop and it was easy to just open up my browser and click on the Facebook bookmark on the taskbar. Like many people have said, Facebook was very distracting at some points, but was also helpful when I wanted to communicate with my friends from back home in Los Angeles. However, we tried to focus more on the privacy aspect of Facebook.
As stated in the introduction the purpose of this research project was to try and test privacy when a Facebook account is kept, deactivated, and deleted. Facebook supposedly makes you unsearchable when you deactivate the account, but they still keep your tagged photos, videos, comment, and statuses and statuses, pictures, videos, and comments can be retrieved one the account is reactivated. The interesting thing that they found out was that once they tried to deactivate their account Facebook would come up with several Facebook friends and show pictures with both people and say that this specific person will miss them if they deactivate their account. I found this interesting because somehow Facebook would keep track of who you would talk to the most and use this information in order to try and keep you on Facebook. Another thing that must be done, which is said on the video, is that you must take a survey and tell Facebook the exact reason of why they wish to deactivate their account.
The people that deactivated their accounts all checked to see if they were searchable and they found that they were not found, but there tagged photos were still there. So basically the three people that deactivated their account were not able to find any of their things until they reactivated their account, which was a good thing because it shows that Facebook is following their privacy terms. Even though Facebook had followed their privacy terms, Facebook made it very hard to use other applications or programs without a Facebook account. One of these programs that was hard to use without a Facebook account was Spotify; a couple of people that deleted or deactivated their accounts on Facebook were not able to use their Spotify accounts and in order to create a new Spotify account it would send you to create a new Facebook account. This goes to show that Facebook is not only an online social network, but it is also intertwined with the rest of the world and other programs and applications.
The two people who deleted their accounts had to go on Google in order to find out how to actually delete their Facebook accounts because Facebook makes it very difficult to delete a Facebook. Once they submitted their deletion form they were given a message that said that their information would be gone within 14 days. We then met up as a group 14 days later to discuss our findings and the two group members that deleted their Facebook were not able to log in, but they were given a message that said that it would take 7 more days, a total of 21 days, in order to get rid of all the information that they had left on Facebook. As a group we found this very interesting because even though all their information, videos, pictures, comments, and post weren’t searchable, Facebook still needed an extra 7 days to do something else. Beside this Facebook did follow their terms of service and privacy because the two people who deleted their Facebook were not searchable and they were not able to log in after 14 days, even though Facebook asked the to wait another 7 days for the process to be complete.
Another problem that was encountered was that one of the group members was doing research on the mobile application and found a couple of rumors saying that when you first download the Facebook app to your smart phone/tablet it says that you will give them the right look at your text messages because they are working on a messaging application for the future. After further research we weren’t able to find any conclusive evidence that Facebook was looking at our text messages; but we did find it interesting that there were a lot of rumors on the same subject.
Overall this project was very interesting because we were able to test Facebook to see if they were following their own privacy policy. Facebook did a good job in following their privacy policy, but there were a couple of strange things that happened while trying to deactivate and delete. The first problem that the deactivated and deleted groups encountered was that Facebook made it very difficult to go through with the process. The second problem was that Facebook made the deleted group wait 7 extra days to complete the deletion process, a total of 21 days. Even though Facebook followed their privacy policy, I still learned that we as society must be very cautious when online social networks because even though we didn't find anything this time Facebook may not follow their policy.
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