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In fact, since 2011, Facebook had faced a series of allegations and lawsuits regarding how the social networking guru handled users’ data. For one, Facebook was facing a class action nationwide in the U.S.A. for tracking users’ cookies after they logged out of the service and using “Sponsored Stories” program to share users’ “likes” with certain advertisers.
According to court filings, Facebook charged advertisers nearly $234 million for Sponsored Stories between January 2011 and August 2012; however, Facebook did not pay users or allow them to opt out of sharing their “likes” with advertisers (Levine, 2013). Facebook continued to track users’ cookie and receive data for user’s browser service instead. More importantly, the data recorded on cookies was found to be used by a third party, such as a website with Facebook’s social plug-ins. Eventually, the lawsuits snowballed and became a nation-wide class action. However, while the case was still pending, Facebook made changes to the logout process in response to the class action, and ensured the cookies no longer sent back personally-identifiable information after users log out (Protalinski, 2012).
On the other hand, Facebook was also facing another class action for its violation of the Federal Wiretap Laws. Basically, the case concerned allegations that when advertisements on Facebook games such as Farmville were clicked on the social network, identifiable information of the user like the Facebook page addresses and Facebook IDs were collected, and disclosed to advertisers without users’ permission. But in May 2014, the San Francisco-based Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Facebook did not violate the wiretap laws for disclosing identifiable information to the user. Hence Facebook has subsequently defeated this particular class action (Kravets, 2014).
1.1 Facebook users abroad and in Taiwan
With regard to Facebook’s global audience, Global Web Index released its quarterly report, GWI Social from 2013 Q4 and found that users between 25 to 34 years old made up the biggest group for its user base, and only 26% of its active users were between ages 16-24
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(Mander, 2014). Similarly, according to Socialbakers (2014), a company that offered monitoring and tracking tools for analysis of social networks, the largest age group of Facebook users in May 2014 in Taiwan was between 25 to 34 years old (31.8%), followed by the users between the age of 18 to 24 years old (21.7%).
In 2010, after surveying 2,253 American adults whom were 18 and older over a period of one month on the phone, Madden & Smith (2010) concluded in their research report with Pew Internet on “Reputation management and social media” that Americans were increasingly becoming aware of the fact that online reputation did matter, but the full scope of its influence was difficult to assess. According to them, young American adults, namely those between 18-29 years of age more actively restricted access to the information they shared. They were more likely to change their privacy settings, delete unwanted comments or remove their names from photos when compared to other age groups. However, the efficacy of these limitations by young adults was unknown. And lastly, the researchers pointed out that reputation management was a moving target, but with many factors outside of a user’s control.
In terms of the Facebook users’ profiles, Gibbs & Cho (2010) looked into cross-cultural differences in privacy management behaviors between American and Korean social network users. Utilizing Petronio's (2002) Communication Privacy Management (CPM) theory, their study explored how the American users on Facebook and Korean users on Cyworld (a social networking site) regulated privacy boundaries in terms of thickness and thinness, size and range of collective privacy boundaries. Results suggested that different national cultures would place different values on privacy.
As for Facebook in Taiwan, the traditional Chinese interface was launched in 2008.
After the launch of the localized interface, what was significant was the immense popularity Facebook received from the famous game “Farmville” (commonly known as “Happy Farm”
in Taiwan). At the time, 23 million people in China and Taiwan tended their digital crops on a
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daily basis (Penny, 2010). Up to date, the overall penetration rate in Asia at the end of 2012 was 6.5 percent. The case in Taiwan was even more significant. With a population of 23 million as of date, Taiwan had a 65 percent penetration rate based on the number released in February 2014 (Taipei Times, 2014). It was nearly ten times more than the overall average for Asian countries. While Taiwan already had the highest Facebook penetration rate in Asia, the number of active Facebook users in Taiwan also reached 14 million per month. Among these 14 million Taiwanese users, 10 million were daily users who conducted their social activities through their Facebook pages every day (Central News Agency, 2013). In addition, it was released in February 2014 that the penetration rate of Facebook users in Taiwan had gone up to 65% (Taipei Times, 2014).
According to the comScore Media Metrix in April 2013 released by ARO/MMX, a marketing research company in Taiwan, there was 118.7 million unique Internet users in Taiwan, while Taiwanese users averagely spent 1,411 minutes, or 23.5 hours online per month. Moreover, at the time of the study, the website with the most visitors was Yahoo!
(Taiwan), and followed by Google Taiwan. Meanwhile, Facebook came in third (ARO/MMX, 2013). While Facebook had admitted a drop in teen users in U.S.A. (Bercovici, 2013), what was interesting was that despite the lawsuits against Facebook and a decrease in number of teen users in U.S.A., Facebook remained as one of the top social networking sites in Taiwan with great popularity. In fact, based on a ranking calculated by Business Next between June to November 2013, Facebook was the second-most popular website in Taiwan, only second to the Web portal Yahoo (Taiwan), and followed by YouTube (Chen, 2014). (Table 1.1)
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Table 1.1 The top 10 popular websites in Taiwan2
Ranking Name of website Type
1 Yahoo (Taiwan) Web portal
2 Facebook Social networking site
3 YouTube Video sharing
4 Google Taiwan Web portal
5 Gamer.com.tw Forum
6 Reuten E-commerce
7 Eyny Forum
8 Mobile01 Forum
9 ET Today News portal
10 Pixnet Blog
Source: Chen (2014)