We watched it happen to MySpace, and now we fear it may destroy Facebook. As businesses realize the potential markets in social-networking Web sites, advertisers begin to violate our havens of procrastination, transforming us from simple users into niche consumers often without our consent.
This seems to be the case after a University of Virginia researcher revealed that 82 percent of Facebook's top 150 applications collect users' private data. Although most of this nonessential content includes adequate warning, most students merely gloss over applications' terms of use, surrendering an element of their privacy to unfamiliar external organizations or companies.
Even worse, it is unclear exactly how that information is used. Facebook requires third parties to sign contracts to protect students' privacy rights, but we aren't sure what those protections are. We aren't sure how many of the advertisements we see alongside our profile page are the result of third-party applications and whether our information can be sold to companies that have nothing to do with Facebook. The commercialization of our beloved Web site, certainly the result of its ever-blooming popularity, does indeed present a scary risk to our privacy.
We implore students to be careful of which applications they add to their profiles. We may soon find ourselves overwhelmed by the digital advertisements that drove quite a few of us away from Web sites like MySpace.com in the first place.
