[Moonliner]

Originally Posted by innerSpaceman

When did facebook "pretend" to be private?

Each time it allowed users to set privacy functions and then ignored them.

Over the years, Facebook has been the subject of criticism, lawsuits, and threatened federal action over various changes to its privacy policy.

In 2007, Facebook announced its Beacon advertising service, which broadcast member activity on partner sites to their Facebook friends. If you bought a movie ticket on Fandango, for example, all of your Facebook friends would immediately know about it. The Beacon program unleashed a campaign from consumer advocacy groups including MoveOn.org as well as a class action law suit that was settled this September. As part of that settlement, Facebook agreed to shut down Beacon and to donate $9.5 million to an independent foundation to "fund projects and initiatives that promote the cause of online privacy, safety, and security."

In February of this year, Facebook found itself at the center of another privacy storm after it announced a change in its policy that would give the company seemingly perpetual control over user-supplied content. That prompted the Electronic Privacy Information Center to threaten filing a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission and also led to the formation of a Facebook group called People Against the new Terms of Service that attracted nearly 150,000 members protesting the changes. The uproar caused the company to rescind those changes and resulted in CEO Mark Zuckerberg holding a press conference where he announced that the company would create "a new approach to site governance" so that its decisionmaking would be more transparent.