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Posted on August 17th, 2012 in Policy by Simply Security | Be the first to comment | Tags: Policy

The number of people who use Facebook on a daily basis is staggering.

The number of people who use Facebook on a daily basis is staggering. The company's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, claims that over 500 million people frequent the site every day, either from mobile devices or traditional computers, constituting a massive amount of the overall daily Internet usage of the entire world, proportionately.

The site has put in a lot of effort to project a facade of corporate care, hosting its own data security policies and claiming to strictly enforce them, even warning users regularly about safety and password protection online. It seems despite this front of concern, behind the scenes the company is being dangerously lax with the information it allows to go live.

Federal affairs go awry

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) conducted an investigation in Facebook's certified security program, an application testing service offered to companies that wanted the social networking site's developers to test their applications and ensure they were secure. Surprisingly, even though the company received almost $100,000 from private developers to run security scans and other tests, Facebook never ran a single test on these programs, yet it still handed out safety certification to application developers it claimed had passed a rigorous battery of scans.

According to ZDNet, the social network leader had been charging individual companies between $200 and $400 for the service, with fraud activity dating back to 2009. The repercussions for all these companies potentially affected by erroneous data protection certifications could be huge, according to the source, as breaches and other costly problems may have arisen due to inappropriate app usage after Facebook assured developers there was no need to fret.

More access denials

In some parts of the world, entire governments are now starting to shun the use of Facebook because of these increasingly egregious issues with the social networker. Germany has banned all facial recognition technology through the site, according to NBC News, while other European countries are doing research to see if they will also ban specific Facebook features. Others have simply stopped using the service altogether.

ZDNet reported that there are still options for those living in affected areas, such as granting specific conditional approvals or accepting a security waiver on the site. One of the biggest problems that officials are noting in trying to create better data security on the site is that Facebook is totally unwilling to work with outside entities, so even in cases where the company is at fault, it's unlikely that external sources will make any headway in trying to resolve problems.

Growing users, sinking strategy

Facebook has a monthly user base of over 900 million individual accounts, according to Digital Trends. That doesn't mean some accounts are redundant, but it implies that a huge number of people could be adversely affected if something were to happen on the grand scale with the site's own server security. Seeing as the company uses minimal to no standards with outside sources and is unwilling to work with other companies or legal bodies, even if it's in the interest of maintaining its own user numbers, it is unmoving in its unwillingness to collaborate. As the site continues to prove a greater threat and more culpable of outright fraud, and its stock shares dip lower and lower, according to Time magazine, the situation for Zuckerberg's company is looking more dim all the time.