What? The C.I.A has access to facebook?

Privacy has just deteriorated.......

Claims have been made (most labelled as conspiracy theories) all throughout the internet signifying this. In fact, claims have been made that the C.I.A is facebook.

As stated in the NZ herald: “The first lot of funding for facebook (in 2004) came from former paypal C.E.O venture capitalist Peter Thiel who invested $500,000. The second round of funding ($12.7 million) came from former chairman of the venture capitalist fund Accel Partners, James Breyer (Kept rather quiet, I wonder why?). Breyer also served on the board of In-Q-Tel (a venture capitalist firm established by the C.I.A), who's area of expertise is data-mining.”

There have also been ties to DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and IAO (Information Awareness Office). IAO was set up in 2002 and it's mission is to achieve Total Information Awareness (TIA), to gather as much information as possible about everybody and centralise it in one location for use and examination by US Government. They work under the guise of “the war on terror”. This makes what they do seem permittable, acceptable and necessary.
Essentially, these intelligence agencies have the potency to act as a big brother type system.

For more info on the above click here.

Facebook uses state of the art facial recognition software. They enabled this feature by default without users consent. Rather than having to tediously 'tag' your friends, facebook does it for you. Great! It identifies your face and stores it in an immense identity book. That's roughly 800 million faces in one database that the CIA and US Government have access to, along with all your personal information ie. Hometown, phone number, email, interests, daily schedules, political affiliations etc etc.

Facebook has had many run-in's with the law regarding privacy issues and has been sued numerous times. These privacy issues include child safety (seen as a platform for paedophiles), unexplained email hacking (to convince people's friends to join), releasing information to advertisers and even tracking your computers cookies. The list goes on.

One of facebooks privacy policies states, “You grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, world-wide license to use any IP content that you post or in connection with facebook (IP license).” This is subject to your ever complicated, frequently altered ambiguous privacy settings, that most people seem to ignore.

One of the most controversial privacy concerns was when facebook set up something know as Beacon. It was (shut down in Sep 2009) a system that collected data (for advertising purposes) from external websites, stored it in a database and published it on user's news feeds. Apparently facebook said it allowed users to 'share online activities with their friends'.

Initially facebook didn't give the users the chance to 'opt-in', users were assigned Beacon by default. There had been reports that the Beacon programme collected data (cookies) without users knowledge. Even when users had 'opted out' and were not logged into facebook, Beacon still tracked their online behaviour for means of decisive advertising. When Beacon was first launched, a sum of 44 partnerships joined. These include giant corporations like Coca-cola, Blockbuster, ebay, Sony etc - All clued up in the art of data-mining and manipulative advertising.
The Beacon programme was so desirable by advertisers because it had the ability to collect information about consumers and their behaviours on a large scale. This then had the potential to skyrocket sales.

One of facebook's privacy policies once stated “We may share your information with third parties, including responsible companies with which we have a relationship with.”

Although Beacon was shut down, it is still unclear whether users' infromation is being handled and analysed, for means of profit, behind closed doors.