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Facebook talks growth and user protection

By The Drum, Administrator

March 4, 2010 | 4 min read

Facebook has amassed a huge global following, but how does it intend to maintain this growth and, more importantly for its ‘friends’, how does it plan to protect its users?

What is Facebook’s policy with regard to repressive states such as China?

We would be very disappointed if users in any country were to have difficulties accessing Facebook.

Criminals such as Craig Lynch using Facebook, how are they being dealt with?

It’s important to note that being a convicted criminal and having a Facebook account isn’t against our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, which governs our relationship with users and others who interact with Facebook. Posting abusive messages or any content that is aggressive or intimidating, or possessing a fake account or providing others with a password to access your account is a violation of our SRR.

Why were new privacy settings defaulted to public?

We believe in openness and that as the world moves towards an open internet, people will want to share more. The initial settings are designed to encourage connections. Making connections—finding people you know, learning about them, searching for what’s being said about topics that interest you—is at the core of our product. And it also underlies the very reason why people use Facebook. Of course, we encourage users to choose exactly the privacy settings that make sense for them, so that they can be as restrictive as they choose to be about the information they share.

How secure is personal information from hackers?

Facebook is constantly working to identify the next cyber threat and build defenses for it. Most of these defenses are invisible to users, and while malicious actors are continually attacking the site, what you see is actually a very small percentage of what’s attempted.

We’ve built numerous defenses to combat phishing and malware, including complex automated systems that work behind the scenes to detect and flag Facebook accounts that are likely to be compromised. Once we detect a phony message, we delete all instances of it across the site. We also block malicious links from being shared and work with third parties to get phishing and malware sites added to browser blacklists or taken down completely. We work hard to educate people on how to be safe through our blog (www.facebook.com/facebook) and Facebook Security Pages (www.facebook.com/security).

Would you be able to provide stats on cyber attacks and crime? Are they on the increase? Are they being resolved?

Facebook does not condone any kind of abusive content whatsoever on the site. While we cannot provide statistics on cyber attacks and crime, we maintain a robust reporting infrastructure that leverages Facebook’s 400 million users who can and do report offensive or potentially dangerous content. This reporting infrastructure includes links on all pages of Facebook, systems to prioritise the most serious reports, and a large team of highly trained, professional reviewers who review reports in priority order.

Where does Facebook plan to be in 2010?

We’re seeing the online world evolve into a more personalised and social experience based around actual people and their real identities. Facebook is at the heart of this, helping people do what they naturally want to do – connect and share – and this will continue to be our focus in 2010.

At the same time, we’ll continue to talk to brands about how they can use Facebook to connect and engage with their customers. We work with many of the largest brands in the world but we also have tens of thousands of smaller businesses who use our online advertising platform. So 2010 will be about working with these businesses – large and small – to help them use Facebook to build a relationship with their customers.

What measures (if any) are being undertaken to counter challengers such as Google Buzz?

The continued growth of the social web will be determined by people and personal relationships. The people that you email and chat with the most may not be your closest friends or the people that you want to share and connect with. We’re supportive of technologies that help make the web more social and the world more open, and we’re interested to see how Google Buzz progresses over time.

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