Is Privacy a Myth for Facebook Users?

The management of personal information has become an insurmountable problem. The reasons are multi-fold and intertwined: technological, legal, regulatory, commercial, and behavioural. The proliferation of online social networks like Facebook has made the problem even more acute because of its business model where users' personally identifiable information is monetised via advertisements. One of the distinctive features of privacy policies is that users' data can be shared with their consent for specified purposes; but users do not have effective control over that data once it is shared with third-parties. There is a race to collect user data as it helps in building unique insights about the users. These insights help in matching the users to advertisements with high success. As advertisers seek a maximum return on investments and the data platforms thrive to achieve this expectation. With the current sophistication levels of data platforms in collecting and processing user data, we highlight why it appears futile to achieve privacy despite correct privacy settings enabled. The business model of monetizing of user data and a slow evolution (or absence in some jurisdictions) of legal frameworks to control proliferation of user data has lead to a power asymmetry in the data ecosystem between the motivated data processors and hapless end-users; thus making the users anxious about their participation in the ecosystem. Erosion of user trust has economic consequences. And a lack of continuous flow of data (volume, variety, velocity, and veracity) into the ecosystem will starve the emergence of data-driven innovations with profound societal impact. We elaborate approaches that could help restore the sense of privacy.