After submitting a request to claim a site, Facebook responded with the following email message: “Sorry! We can't confirm your place just yet. We didn't receive an official business document with your request. To claim your place, please reply to this email with one of the following documents in an attachment. We'll review it and do our best to help.

• A utility bill for your place of business
• Your local business license (issued by your city, county, state, etc.)
• A tax file for your business
• Certificate of Formation (for a partnership)
• Articles of Incorporation (for a corporation)”.

Since its launch in February 2004, Facebook was confronted with a long list of privacy related issues. In August 2007, PHP code used to dynamically generate home and user pages was displayed while accessing some accounts, raising concerns about data security. From November 2007 to September 2009, Facebook’s advertising system used a feature called Beacon to send data collected from external websites to the social networking site. After a class action lawsuit, the code was changed to require user approval for before any data gathered could be published.

Several governments are now recommending or requesting that employees refrain from using Facebook at work. In May 2007, federal public servants, MPPs, and cabinet ministers in Canada did see a warning message "The Internet website that you have requested has been deemed unacceptable for use for government business purposes" after trying to access Facebook. A number of local governments in Germany, the UK, and Finland imposed restrictions on the use of social networking sites due to privacy concerns. Thilo Weichert, data protection commissioner for the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, requested in 2011 that state institutions shut down fan pages on Facebook and remove the "Like" button from their websites.

"Whoever visits facebook.com or uses a plug-in must expect that he or she will be tracked by the company for two years," Weichert said. "Facebook builds a broad individual and for members even a personalized profile." To avoid being profiled, he urged Internet users to "keep their fingers from clicking on social plug-ins." He recommended that users "not set up a Facebook account."

In 2011, law students from Austria filed complaints with the Irish Data Protection Commissioner on how Facebook stores its users' information. One of the complaints relates to the fact that Facebook collects and stores email addresses from non-Facebook users when they are invited to connect by users of the social network. Ireland handles issues related to the social networking outside the U.S. and Canada since Facebook maintains an office in Dublin. The filings are now part of an audit by Irish authorities on how Facebook collects and stores information on millions of users in the European Union.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a public interest research group based in Washington, D.C., says that Facebook changed user privacy settings again with the recent transition to the Timeline profile. Users that did choose not to disclose new friends on their wall will now find that any new connection is displayed on their Timeline. In a letter (available here) send to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), EPIC asks whether changes Facebook has made are consistent with the terms of a settlement reached between Facebook and the FTC.

The social networking site doesn’t make it easy to say “Good Buy.” Simply closing a user account does not automatically delete the data associated with the profile, including ‘likes’, friends, comments, and images. If users really feel the need to “unfriend” Facebook, they can use this link. After logging in, they can proceed by clicking on the “Delete My Account” button. Facebook will ask to confirm the action by re-typing the password and a capture. After clicking yes, the network confirms the action by stating “Permanently Delete Account - Your account has been deactivated from the site and will be permanently deleted within 14 days. If you log into your account within the next 14 days, you will have the option to cancel your request.”

To verify that users and business entities are authentic, Facebook is now asking for articles of incorporation, business tax filings, business licenses, or copies of utility bills. Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com

“Whoever visits facebook.com or uses a plug-in must expect that he or she will be tracked by the company for two years,” the ULD says in a press release. The agency claims that Facebook uses information gathered to build personalized profiles for each member. “Such a profiling infringes German and European data protection law.”

ULD says that Facebook’s privacy statement "does not nearly meet the legal requirements relevant for compliance of legal notice, privacy consent and general terms of use." All website owners in the German State of Schleswig-Holstein should immediately deactivate their account and stop passing user data to Facebook.” In cases of non-compliance, the agency said that it will take further steps by the end of September 2011.

“ULD has pointed out informally for some time that many Facebook offerings are in conflict with the law,” Commissioner Thilo Weichert said in a statement. “This unfortunately has not prevented website owners from using the respective services. Web analytics is among those services and especially informative for [Facebook’s] advertising purposes. It is paid with the data of the users. With the help of these data Facebook has gained an estimated market value of more than 50 bn. [billion] dollars.”

ULD advised people to "keep their fingers from clicking on social plug-ins such as the 'like'-button and not to set up a Facebook account if they wish to avoid a comprehensive profiling by this company."

The very fact that virtual possessions don't have a physical form may actually enhance their value, researchers at Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) and School of Design discovered in a study of 21 teenagers. A fuller appreciation of the sentiments people can develop for these bits of data could be factored into technology design and could provide opportunities for new products and services, they said.

"A digital photo is valuable because it is a photo but also because it can be shared and people can comment on it," said John Zimmerman, associate professor of human-computer interaction and design. For the young people in the CMU study, a digital photo that friends have tagged, linked and annotated is more meaningful than a photo in a frame or a drawer.

One of the subjects said she always takes lots of photos at events and uploads them immediately so she and her friends can tag and dish about them. "It feels like a more authentic representation of the event," the 16-year-old told the researchers. "We comment and agree on everything together ... then there's a shared sense of what happened."

The penchant of people to collect and assign meaning to what are often ordinary objects is well known. "A house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff," the comedian George Carlin famously observed. But a lot of stuff that often is cherished is being replaced by electronic equivalents, such as e-books and iPod downloads.

For their study, William Odom, a Ph.D. student in HCII, Zimmerman and Jodi Forlizzi, an associate professor of design and human-computer interaction, recruited nine girls and 12 boys, ages 12-17, from middle- and upper-middle-class families who had frequent access to the Internet, mobile phones and other technology. The researchers interviewed them about their everyday lives, their use of technology and about the physical and virtual possessions that they valued.

If a house is a place to store your stuff, then a mobile phone might be considered a treasure box that gives you access to your stuff, the interviews revealed. The "placelessness" of virtual possessions stored online rather than on a computer often enhanced their value because they were always available. One 17-year-old participant said she uploaded all of her photos online so that she could access them whether she was in her bed or at the mall. "Obviously, I can't look at them all and that's not the point," she said. "I like knowing that they'll be there if I want them."

The degree to which users can alter and personalize online objects affects their value. A 17-year-old study participant spent a lot of time developing an avatar for the video game Halo and received a lot of comments and input from friends. The original drawings, he said, "are definitely something I'll keep." Accruing "metadata" — online time stamps, activity logs and annotations — also enhanced the value of virtual possessions.

Participants noted that they could display things online, such as a photograph of a boyfriend disliked by parents, which were important to their identity but could never be displayed in a bedroom. The online world, in fact, allowed the teenagers to present different facets of themselves to appropriate groups of friends or to family. Developing privacy controls and other tools for determining who gets to see what virtual possessions in which circumstances is both a need and an opportunity for technology developers, the researchers said.

"In the future, our research will explore what happens when the boundaries of virtual and physical possessions are more blurred," Forlizzi said. "We will look at things like tags and social metadata and the role they play in sharing experiences with family members and peers."

One opportunity for technology developers, the team said, would be creating technologies that enable users to encode more metadata into their virtual possessions. An example might be aggregating an individual's status updates, songs most listened to and perhaps even news and weather information associated with a particular event.

Today’s teenagers often value digital content more than "real toys.” Facebook updates, online music collections, and email threads may be as precious to them as a favorite book was to their parents. Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com

The PUE measures energy overhead. It is a ratio that compares the amount of energy used in a data center to power servers, switches and storage devices to the total amount of energy used, including what's needed to distribute power, air condition the facility and run the machines. The goal is to optimize data centers so that almost all the power is dedicated to powering servers, switches and disk drives, Cisco says in a press release. A perfectly efficient datacenter would have a PUE very close to 1, while the average for data centers today is about 2, Green Grid says.

The government approval was a result of work by the Global Metrics Harmonization Task Force on measurement protocols. The name sounds like a New Age association to study crystals and convergence, but it is actually comprised of engineers and policy wonks. They come from agencies like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Energy Department, Japan's Economy, Trade and Industry ministry and its Green IT Promotion Council, and a European Community research center studying data centers.

Establishing standards for efficiency in data centers is becoming increasingly important. In 2007, the EPA estimated that data centers were using 1.5 percent of America's electric power and would be using 3 percent by 2011 if growth trends continued.

But the combination of new technology and higher electricity prices are helping reduce energy use by data centers. The biggest single change is the move to consolidate data centers and move applications and infrastructure to the cloud. Big, purpose-designed, stand-alone data centers can be much more efficient than smaller data centers located inside general-purpose office buildings.

And cloud architecture with virtualized servers dramatically increases the work run on each server, increasing efficiency. Before the age of virtualization, it was common to have one server handle each application, with each server running at 10 percent of its capacity. Some data centers had numerous "ghost servers" that kept humming away long after the project for which they were purchased had been cancelled.

Companies building new data centers are achieving dramatic results. Google, Facebook and Cisco have all achieved PUE numbers approaching the highest possible rating of 1. The need to reduce electric power use has made data center operators much more conscious of air-flow, and architects are careful to position racks of servers to avoid "hot spots" that require excessive cooling. Advice columns tell managers to take advantage of outside air for cooling when temperatures fall and to cover over holes in raised floors where cool air dissipates.

Facebook, for example, places batteries for backup power near servers, rather than in a separate battery room, to minimize power transmission losses. The company cools the plant by letting air from the outside flow over foam pads moistened by water sprays. Cisco's newest data center can use ambient fresh air up to 75 degrees before the air has to be chilled, which it calculates will be 65 percent of the time. If the power fails, instead of hundreds of batteries for backup power it uses rotary flywheels to run generators until the backup diesel engines can be started up.

Such gains and the promise of cloud computing led clean-tech analysts Pike Research to predict that data centers worldwide will use 38 percent less energy than estimated by 2020. That drop will contribute to a decline in total data center energy costs to $16 billion in 2020 from $23.3 billion in 2010.  Pike predicts the decline will also reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 28 percent.

Still, measuring the environmental impact of data centers requires more studies. Green Grid says it is working on metrics to relate the use of water by a facility to its useful work produced. It also is working on measures that reflect whether the center is powered by carbon-dioxide-emitting fossil fuels or by clean, renewable energy sources.

EPA has applied its EnergyStar rating system to evaluate the efficiency of data center servers. Now it is working on ratings for storage boxes and network switches.

New measurers called Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) aim to make data centers greener by reducing the energy overhead. EPA estimates that data centers in the U.S. will be using 3 percent of America's available electric power by the end of 2011 if growth trends continue. Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com

"Through special custom software we collected data from more than 1,000,000 Facebook users," the website says on its "How we did it" page. "What we collected is their ‘public data’ - some of their personal data (name, country, Facebook groups they subscribe to) plus their main profile picture and a few friend relationships. We built a database with all this data, then began to analyze the pictures that showed smiling faces. The vast majority of pictures were both amateurish and somehow almost involuntarily or unconsciously alluring. And they are almost always smiling."

Based on their website, it seems that two people are behind the latest Facebook exploit. Paolo Cirio states that he works as a media artist in various fields, and Alessandro Ludovico says that he is a media critic and editor in chief of Neural Magazine. A press release issued by Lovely Faces indicates that the duo is based in Berlin, Germany. However, the IP address used by the website points to Go Daddy in Scottsdale, Arizona.

"Once the database was ready, we studied and customized a face recognition algorithm," Lovely Faces continues on its "How we did it" page. "The algorithm used self learning neural networks and was programmed to "group" the huge amount of faces we collected (and their attached data) in a few simple categories. The categories are among the most popular that we usually use to define a person at a distance, without knowing him/her, or judging based only on a few behaviors. We picked six categories ("climber", "easy going", "funny", "mild", "sly" and "smug" - working definitions), with some intuitive differences, for both male and female subjects. The software effectively extracted 250,000 faces that were connected to the relevant public data in our database."

The irony continues on the Lovely Faces legal disclaimer page. "If your identity has been hurt by this website, just write to us and we'll remove your data instantly. This website is a work of art and we're committed to avoiding any related annoyances."

What can Facebook users do to avoid being categorized as a "smug" or "sly" again? Short from deleting their profile from the social networking site, they can fine-tune their privacy settings and enable Facebook’s new https setting that should be available now for most if not all user profiles.

A dating startup called Lovely Faces lifted about one million user profiles from Facebook and used 250,000 pictures to populate its website.