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A face book or facebook is a paper or online directory of individuals' photographs and names published by some American universities. In particular, the term denotes publications of this type distributed by university administrations at the start of the academic year, with the intention of helping students to get to know each other.
Colleges and universities in the United States have often published official or unofficial books listing their students, faculty, or staff, together with pictures and limited biographical data.[ citation needed ] By the early 2000s, some face books were being published online offering a number of new features, including password protection, more detailed information, more advanced indexing and searching, and the ability for people to upload and enter information and photographs. [1]
In early 2004, Mark Zuckerberg, a sophomore at Harvard University, created an unofficial online face book at the website "thefacebook.com", the forerunner of the Facebook service, out of frustration that the university's official online face book project was taking too long. [1] The development of a campus-wide face book had previously been stalled by privacy concerns, many of which became prominent in November 2003 when Zuckerberg was accused of breaching security and violating copyrights and individual privacy. Zuckerberg had created a website, www.facemash.com, that used photos taken without authorization from Harvard House-based face books, using the photos in a system to rate the attractiveness of students. [2]
Hot or Not is a rating site that allowed users to rate the attractiveness of photos submitted voluntarily by others. The site offered a matchmaking engine called 'Meet Me' and an extended profile feature called "Hotlists". The domain hotornot.com is currently owned by Hot Or Not Limited, and was previously owned by Avid Life Media. 'Hot or Not' was a significant influence on the people who went on to create the social media sites Facebook and YouTube.
Pforzheimer House, nicknamed PfoHo (FOE-hoe) and formerly named North House, is one of twelve undergraduate residential Houses at Harvard University. It was named in 1995 for Carol K. and Carl Howard Pforzheimer Jr, major University and Radcliffe College benefactors, and their family.
i2hub was a peer-to-peer file sharing service and program designed and intended primarily for use by university and college students.
Wirehog was a friend-to-friend file sharing program that was linked to Facebook and allowed people to transfer files directly between computers.
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is an American businessman and philanthropist. He co-founded the social media service Facebook, along with his Harvard roommates in 2004, and its parent company Meta Platforms, of which he is chairman, chief executive officer and controlling shareholder.
Social network services are increasingly being used in legal and criminal investigations. Information posted on sites such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook has been used by police and university officials to prosecute users of said sites. In some situations, content posted on Myspace has been used in court to determine an appropriate sentence based on a defendant's attitude.
Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, its name derives from the face book directories often given to American university students. Membership was initially limited to Harvard students, gradually expanding to other North American universities. Since 2006, Facebook allows everyone to register from 13 years old, except in the case of a handful of nations, where the age limit is 14 years. As of December 2022, Facebook claimed 3 billion monthly active users. As of October 2023, Facebook ranked as the 3rd most visited website in the world, with 22.56% of its traffic coming from the United States. It was the most downloaded mobile app of the 2010s.
Christopher "Chris" Hughes is an American entrepreneur and author who co-founded and served as spokesman for the online social directory and networking site Facebook until 2007. He was the publisher and editor-in-chief of The New Republic from 2012 to 2016.
ConnectU was a social networking website launched on May 21, 2004, that was founded by Harvard students Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra in December 2002. Users could add people as friends, send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Users were placed in networks based upon the domain name associated with the email address they used for registration.
Harry Roy Lewis is an American computer scientist, mathematician, and university administrator known for his research in computational logic, textbooks in theoretical computer science, and writings on computing, higher education, and technology. He is Gordon McKay Research Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University, and was Dean of Harvard College from 1995 to 2003.
Tyler Howard Winklevoss is an American investor, founder of Winklevoss Capital Management and Gemini cryptocurrency exchange, and former Olympic rower. Winklevoss co-founded HarvardConnection along with his brother Cameron Winklevoss and a Harvard classmate of theirs, Divya Narendra. In 2004, the Winklevoss brothers sued Mark Zuckerberg, claiming he stole their ConnectU idea to create the social networking service site Facebook. As a rower, Winklevoss competed in the men's pair rowing event at the 2008 Summer Olympics with his identical twin brother and rowing partner, Cameron.
Cameron Howard Winklevoss is an American cryptocurrency investor, former Olympic rower, and cofounder of Winklevoss Capital Management and Gemini cryptocurrency exchange. He competed in the men's pair rowing event at the 2008 Summer Olympics with his rowing partner and identical twin brother, Tyler Winklevoss. Winklevoss and his brother are known for co-founding HarvardConnection along with Harvard classmate Divya Narendra. In 2004, the Winklevoss twins sued Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, claiming he stole their ConnectU idea to create the social networking site Facebook. In addition to ConnectU, Winklevoss also co-founded the social media website Guest of a Guest with Rachelle Hruska.
The Social Network is a 2010 American biographical drama film directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin, based on the 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich. It portrays the founding of social networking website Facebook. It stars Jesse Eisenberg as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, with Andrew Garfield as Eduardo Saverin, Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker, Armie Hammer as Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and Max Minghella as Divya Narendra. Neither Zuckerberg nor any other Facebook staff were involved with the project, although Saverin was a consultant for Mezrich's book.
The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal is a 2009 book by Ben Mezrich about the founding of Facebook, adapted by Aaron Sorkin for the 2010 film The Social Network. Co-founder Eduardo Saverin served as Mezrich's main consultant, although he declined to speak with him while the book was being researched. After Zuckerberg and Saverin settled their lawsuit, Saverin broke off contact with the author.
Facebook is a social networking service originally launched as TheFacebook on February 4, 2004, before changing its name to simply Facebook in August 2005. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students, in particular Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and gradually most universities in the United States and Canada, corporations, and by September 2006, to everyone with a valid email address along with an age requirement of being 13 or older.
Divya Narendra is an American businessman. He is the CEO and co-founder of SumZero along with Harvard classmate Aalap Mahadevia. He also co-founded HarvardConnection with Harvard University classmates Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss.
Since the arrival of early social networking sites in the early 2000s, online social networking platforms have expanded exponentially, with the biggest names in social media in the mid-2010s being Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat. The massive influx of personal information that has become available online and stored in the cloud has put user privacy at the forefront of discussion regarding the database's ability to safely store such personal information. The extent to which users and social media platform administrators can access user profiles has become a new topic of ethical consideration, and the legality, awareness, and boundaries of subsequent privacy violations are critical concerns in advance of the technological age.
Michael Zimmer is a privacy and data ethics scholar. He currently is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Marquette University and Director of the Center for Data, Ethics, and Society. Previously, he was on the faculty at the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and director of the Center for Information Policy Research. Zimmer is on the advisory board of the Future of Privacy Forum, and was on the executive committee of the Association of Internet Researchers from 2009-2016. He was the Microsoft Resident Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School from 2007-2008.
A user profile is a collection of settings and information associated with a user. It contains critical information that is used to identify an individual, such as their name, age, portrait photograph and individual characteristics such as knowledge or expertise. User profiles are most commonly present on social media websites such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn; and serve as voluntary digital identity of an individual, highlighting their key features and traits. In personal computing and operating systems, user profiles serve to categorise files, settings, and documents by individual user environments, known as ‘accounts’, allowing the operating system to be more friendly and catered to the user. Physical user profiles serve as identity documents such as passports, driving licenses and legal documents that are used to identify an individual under the legal system.
Meta Platforms Inc., or Meta for short, has faced a number of privacy concerns. These stem partly from the company's revenue model that involves selling information collected about its users for many things including advertisement targeting. Meta Platforms Inc. has also been a part of many data breaches that have occurred within the company. These issues and others are further described including user data concerns, vulnerabilities in the company's platform, investigations by pressure groups and government agencies, and even issues with students. In addition, employers and other organizations/individuals have been known to use Meta Platforms Inc. for their own purposes. As a result, individuals’ identities and private information have sometimes been compromised without their permission. In response to these growing privacy concerns, some pressure groups and government agencies have increasingly asserted the users’ right to privacy and to be able to control their personal data.