Background

In popular culture, Facebook has since been a part of more than 800 million user’s social lives and is expected to hit one billion by 2012 [5]. From the site first going online in 2004, it has grown and developed from a simple user’s page with information that was revealed based on how much they were willing to reveal to a form of lifestyle, with users constantly checking status updates on their mobile phones or nearby laptops multiple times a day [5].

Facebook originally was only open to college or university students with a valid college email address but a year later was opened to high schools [5]. This was later criticized briefly for the privacy concerns based on a lack of checking if the users were, in reality, high school students. Over the course of several years, Facebook’s rapid growth via word-of-mouth brought the implementation of new user features like the “like” button, “poking”, and Facebook chatting. “Liking” things on Facebook is one of the most popular features, eventually being implemented in other websites linked to Facebook as a way of advertising and revealing what a user was doing while off of Facebook [3].