In your face

Social networking site or corporate invader of privacy? As the Facebook phenomenon grows, the jury is out

IF EYES are the window to the soul, Facebook is a contorted mirror, the final nail in the voyeuristic coffin." A cyber-cynic friend came up with this gem last week as we embarked on our umpteenth Facebook debate. She was being virtually super-poked by a callous ex-boyfriend for the second time in as many days; I was lamenting being in the virtual doghouse for not having paid enough 'cyber-attention' to a friend whose online status had declared she was having a bad day.

Founded by Harvard undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg in early 2004, the social networking site Facebook was initially aimed at students in the US. The premise was simple: build a personal profile and your friends will come.

Cashing in on the insatiable human appetite for sneaky peeks into other people's lives, the site became an overnight success, quickly establishing itself as a worldwide phenomenon. Hundreds of users became thousands, thousands became millions. Current figures suggest there are 64 million active users worldwide (with rivals Bebo claiming 22 million and big daddy MySpace 110 million).

So far, so cosy and socially inclusive. A click of a button and any user can, privacy settings allowing, see anyone else's favourite books, music and films, discover their religious and political leanings, as well as what they got up to at the weekend. The pièce de résistance is the photo libraries. Facebook is the most popular website for uploading images, with millions added daily. Thousands of friends and colleagues ogle each other's holiday snaps, family pictures and 'spontaneous' shots from the night before. A good friend is unashamedly honest about it: "I surf the site to see people I went to school with, ex-boyfriends and old colleagues, and then I compare our lives. I check one of my ex's picture libraries every week, just to be nosy, even though I was the one who chucked him."

Another friend admitted that, for the most part, her Facebook membership is a vanity exercise. "Essentially, you can be who you want to be on there. If I'm honest, I have only read one of the five books in my favourites list and have only watched two of my ten 'favourite' films. But who would ever know? An ex-colleague recently contacted me and told me I was 'Facebook fabulous' – and that's exactly the impression I want to give."

But the excitement that surrounded the site in the early days may be beginning to fade. There is a growing number of cases in which people have lost their jobs or their partners, or become involved in legal wrangles because of improper conduct on the site.

Just last week a Moroccan court sentenced a 26-year-old computer engineer to three years in prison for setting up a Facebook account in the name of King Mohammed's brother. Fouad Mourtada was found guilty of falsifying data and imitating the prince without his consent. "It was just a joke, a gag," he is quoted as saying on a website set up by supporters (www.helpfouad.com), but the judge clearly disagreed.

Another recent case involved a senior police officer who was refused a promotion. A background check revealed a previous warning over his Facebook content. Inspector Chris Dreyfus, the head of British Transport Police's royalty and government protection, was interviewed for the post of chief inspector by Bedford Police but was turned down when his prospective employers noticed the warning from his current employers. Dreyfus's Facebook profile had pictures of him posing at a Tube station in his uniform with various graphic sexual comments about his gay lifestyle.

Increasingly, reports suggest that marketers, employers and teachers are using Facebook to see what the rest of us are up to. A user's personal profile page can showcase everything from their birthday to their hobbies, home town, phone number and sexual orientation. And while Facebook has privacy features that can restrict who sees these profile pages, many users either ignore them or simply never get round to switching them on.

Far from connecting its users, Facebook seems increasingly to have the potential to isolate its fans, affording them a false sense of security. Moreover, an initial desire to appear popular (and rack up a healthy 'friends' count) can leave many handing over their most private information to acquaintances they haven't seen in years.

The changing dynamic of the site does not stop there. Early last year, almost 46,000 users signed a petition called 'Facebook! Stop invading my privacy!' after being bombarded with ads. Zuckerberg was forced to issue an apology when it emerged that Beacon, a program which logs online purchases and then tells your friends what you've been buying (and sends them ads for the same items), was operating as an opt-out feature rather than an opt-in.

Certainly there is little doubt that the site, which is free to join, has enormous earning potential. Last year it announced a range of big-name collaborations, linking up with Coca-Cola, Blockbuster, Sony Pictures and Condé Nast among others.

In March 2006, just two years after its launch, it was reported in Business Week that Facebook's asking price could be as much as £1 billion. That figure could now be as high as £7.5 billion, since Microsoft recently bought a 1.6% stake in the company for £120 million, and Asian investor Lee Ka-Shing took 0.4% for £30 million.

And so the last two years have seen a considerable shift in Facebook's potential – and its pitfalls. For many, it remains the ideal way to keep in touch with friends, but others have not been so lucky. Stephen Fry recently admitted that when he joined the site, he was bombarded with 150 requests a day from admirers hoping to be accepted as friends. "I closed down my pages to new friends and visitors. I suppose people might reasonably think me naive, or indeed idiotic, to have imagined that I could inhabit a social networking site peaceably.

"I manage to shop in supermarkets and travel on Tube trains, however, and I had hoped maybe it would be possible to maintain a Facebook presence also. The frustrating thing is that this kind of thing causes others to think that well-known people are stand-offish and don't deign to participate in the world others daily involve themselves in."

While interest in Fry's celebrity is hardly surprising, others have not been so fortunate in the attention they have received. Last year it was alleged that Argos employee Tom Beech was sacked for setting up a Facebook thread entitled: 'I work at Argos and can't wait to leave because it's shit.' One report claimed that bosses instructed Beech to shut down his posting, and suspended him from his job before a disciplinary hearing led to him being sacked for gross misconduct.

"I'm stunned they've fired me for this," Beech is quoted as saying. "I had a really bad day and was feeling overworked and underpaid. My mistake was to sound off on Facebook. I wish I'd moaned to a mate."

He is not alone. Former employees at The Number UK, which operates the 118 118 directory enquiry service, caused controversy last year when they created the 'Survivors of 118 118' page on the site. Describing itself as "a group for survivors of the 118 experience: Numbers, politeness, quality, productivity, presence, cut-off, refund, angry, Scottish. Bovvered!', it attacked The Number UK's callers through a series of posts. Bosses reacted furiously and had the page removed

Things have taken an even darker turn in the US, with reports suggesting that a woman seeking compensation for sexual assault could have her MySpace and Facebook pages produced in court as evidence.

Indeed, as the public appetite for the site grows, so too does scrutiny by outsiders. One survey found that 62% of British employers now check the Facebook (and MySpace and Bebo) pages of their job applicants, and that a quarter had rejected candidates as a result.

Interestingly, users who have had enough and want out have a long way to go. While it is possible to strip back your profile entirely from view, even once deactivated your information will remain on Facebook's servers.

And while the site maintains it works in compliance with all data protection legislation and says it does not use information from deactivated accounts, not everyone is convinced. Dave Evans, a senior data-protection practice manager, said: "One of the things we're concerned about is that the onus is entirely on the individual to delete their data. Someone who has deactivated their account might not find themselves motivated enough to delete information that's about them, maybe on their wall, or on other people's sites."

Controversies aside, the Facebook phenomenon is not going away. Some economic experts have suggested there could be anything up to 200 million users by next year. Virtual reality seems to be here to stay.

HEATHER ATHIE, 23, created a group on the website during her time at university, entitled Facebook Priory, to help fellow Facebook addicts

"WHEN I was writing my dissertation I found that I was constantly checking my Facebook account. Even the night before the deadline all my classmates were on it too. It's not such a problem now but I still look at it far too much while I'm working."

She also finds that the constant stream of updates drives her mad. "When I broke up with my boyfriend most people heard about it through Facebook, which was a bit weird."

Athie also noted the number of men that approach her through the site. "Every other day I'll get another friend request from some guy. Sometimes they're a friend of a friend or someone I met at a party – so it's awkward to say no – but other times it's a total stranger.

"An old boss of mine, whom I dislike, has requested me as a friend about ten times. I always reject him but he still persists. That type of thing can get quite annoying."

JONATHAN BURDEN, a 21-year-old club night promoter, is a self-confessed Facebook addict who spends about 20 hours per week surfing the site. He has collected a grand total of 1,042 Facebook friends.

"IT'S A serious obsession. On a bad day I could be on the site for up to five hours, but it usually takes up about three hours of my time every day.

"I use Facebook to promote my RIP club night so it is work, but it goes beyond that. It's easy to waste so much time on the site – after just an hour you know exactly what all your friends are up to, and then it's tempting to start looking at people's photos. All the latest applications just make the situation worse: I spend a lot of time playing Facebook Tetris."

But Burden has had other problems with the website too. Since his appearance on the Channel 4 reality television show Shipwrecked last year, a large number of strangers have tried to gain access to his profile. "Every day I get at least three requests from people I don't know trying to add me as a friend. I reject all of them, but it does get annoying.

"I also get random people repeatedly messaging me. One particular girl sent about five nonsensical messages in one day."

SIOBHAN SYNNOT, a freelance journalist based in Scotland, opened a Facebook account in June last year.
Although initially enthusiastic about the website, a tool she uses to keep in touch with friends and family who live abroad, she has recently found herself hounded by the attentions of unwanted friends.

"The trouble with Facebook is that certain people I know, who are not necessarily good friends, add me as their 'friend' on the website. They're quite often people I went to school with, and, to be honest, there's usually a reason why we don't see each other any more. It just seems so pointless to make friends with people again online if I don't care enough about them to want to meet up in person.

"Now I feel tied to the site. People are poking and prodding me on it most days and it seems like a necessity to respond. I feel like I need to hide from my own Facebook page. So I've been culling my Facebook friends subtly: I wait until they have lots of other friends online so they won't notice."

Synnot now believes that Facebook is not really about keeping in touch with friends, but about collecting as many as possible. "It's just a popularity contest, really," she says.

"The fact that people have long lists of friends shows that they simply don't exercise any kind of restraint over who they add. Now that you can rate your friends, it's just made things worse."

One of the worst features of the site, she says, is the constant stream of status reports. "The utter dullness of people's status reports is unbearable. One friend on the site writes updates about his boiler; another one wrote about walking to work. There's also a lot of boring information about people's children.

"But I think Facebook encourages tactlessness too. A friend of mine only found out that he'd been dumped when he got a report telling him that his girlfriend had changed her relationship status to single."

According to Synnot, the website also promotes stalking. "Certain people take rather too keen an interest in the status reports – I've had people commenting on something I wrote on Facebook later on in conversation. That's pretty creepy.

"I think people are finally beginning to realise that anonymity is actually highly underrated."

HENRY RALEY, a 21-year-old restaurant administrator, says that using the site got him into trouble with his boss and with Facebook's operators

"I WAS caught checking the site at work when I should have been doing other things. And I'm also in trouble with the Facebook administrators because someone misinterpreted a joke and complained about me.
Now I'm on my final warning for violation of the contract."

Despite these problems, Raley admits he is still a fan of the site. "Facebook has become a matter of course when I go online, and I do feel the need to check it regularly."

He says that all the site's users spy on each other's profiles, and that the practice is largely harmless.

"Everyone enjoys a cheeky browse through other people's profiles occasionally," he says. "If they say they don't, I'm pretty certain they're lying."

Raley has been the victim of stalking. "I have been stalked on Facebook by two guys and one girl that I don't know.

"I've been asked out three times in all. Still, it wasn't malicious."

Facebook: The facts

• Facebook has around 64 million active users
• There are more than eight million active users in the UK
• Half the users are outside of college and the largest growing demographic is the over-25s
• Half of the active users visit the site daily
• More than 14 million photos are uploaded daily, making it the most popular photo-sharing application on the web
• Facebook employs more than 450 people
• Facebook registers 65 billion page views a month
• The average user devotes 20 minutes a day to the site
• Traffic is up 366% since the start of 2007
• There are 55,000 regional, work-related,collegiate and high-school networks

MySpace: The facts

• MySpace claims to have nearly 110 million monthly active users around the globe
• 85% of MySpace users are of voting age
• A quarter of all Americans are on MySpace; in the UK it's as common to have a MySpace site as it is to own a dog
• Figures suggest that on average 300,000 new people sign up to MySpace every day
• MySpace is one of the fastest-growing websites of all time, with 50 million mails per day (more than Yahoo, Hotmail or Google) and 1.5 billion images (eight million images uploaded daily)
• Eight million artists and bands have a presence on MySpace Music. Acts including Lily Allen, Arctic Monkeys and Colby Caillat were discovered on the site by users

BLOGGING ON THE JOB

THE use of social networking sites at work is something businesses want to control. Dismissing an employee who has made derogatory comments about their employer is one thing, but whether getting the sack just for using these sites at work is justified will depend on the firm's IT policy and contract of employment. Is there a specific policy to limit the use of these sites in terms of e-mail content etc? Such a policy can be used to control employees' behaviour and justify disciplinary action. Confusion arises if employers allow staff to use the net for personal use but discipline them when they cross a line. Unless the limits are clear, the policy is useless.

Employers' concerns about lost productivity, breaches of security or damage to reputation will be seen by the courts as factors that justify monitoring IT use at work. However, as a result, employees' privacy may be breached, entitling them to pursue legal action against their employer.

Sam Middlemiss, employment law expert, Robert Gordon University