In 2012, Facebook went public worldwide and changed its privacy settings without telling anyone. They changed the default settings to share with everyone instead of just friends. The privacy changes basically gave them the right to use the your information for anything they need, mainly advertisements. Even thou Facebook is free to join, they make their money through advertisements that are customized for you based on you the information you provide. If you look at Facebook’s privacy settings, they list all the ways they retrieve information including things you like, share, your friends like and share, your payments, apps you have, and even information from your mobile device such as geographical information based on your location/GPS. This is an invasion of privacy fetishism and makes everyday users victims to government and advertisements. You are giving information without even knowing that you are, the blogs and posts you share and like give Facebook the tools to select which advertisements to show you. Most people, if aware of this, would not search or like what they like if they knew that Facebook was going to collect the information. The documentary showed how information can be misused and be marked as red flags and violate your freedom of speech and the first amendment. Facebook tries to rewords it policy to ‘butter’ it up when in reality it violates your freedoms and privacy. Even thou most people say they have nothing to hide, everyone eventually has something to search that they don’t want surveillance.

This documentary has informed me to a lot of Facebook’s privacy violations that I was not aware of. It has definitely made me re think about keeping my Facebook active and now to be cautious about my actions online. Although I don’t do anything wrong, I feel as if the internet can be lead back to anything I may have done wrong and affect jobs or opportunities that may come up. I now feel as if I should warn others not to do anything oblivious online and to be careful.