Facebook: 500 million reasons to be cheerful

Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook has hit the 500 million member mark, adding 100 million new users to its ranks in the past six months alone.

It's a remarkable achievement for a company that has had as many criticisms thrown at it as it has compliments.

For a web site that frequently gets drawn into privacy debates and discussions about errant hit men, and is run by a controversial chief executive in Mark Zuckerberg, on the surface it does not seem to be doing anything wrong at all.

As well as announcing its 500 million users, July also saw Facebook face a legal challenge over Zuckerberg's ownership of the site, a case that seems to have many twists.

When it was first suggested that businessman Paul Ceglia owned the lion's share of Facebook, the firm's PR team rubbished the very idea.

However, Ceglia has since claimed to have a signed piece of paper proving that he owns as much as 84 per cent of Facebook, since when Zuckerberg has been able to say only that he is " quite sure" this is not the case.

July also saw Facebook dragged into the gunman Raoul Moat's sphere of influence. A Facebook page describing him as "a legend" appeared on the site and was soon followed by copycats.

This, perhaps understandably, irked the UK government, and prime minister David Cameron said that he would speak to Facebook about the offending pages.

Facebook took the stance that it was not responsible for the problems, explaining that no one had asked it to remove the pages - at least no one important - and left them in place. This carried on through the week as time and again the firm was asked to explain itself.

"We believe that enabling people to have these different opinions and debate about a topic can help bring together lots of different views for a healthy discussion," ran the oft-repeated official word on the subject.

However, perhaps realising that the page was a step too far, its creator took it down themselves.

Still in July, Facebook added a link to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre. Worthy though this is, the firm could not resist insisting that no one should describe it as a 'panic button', despite the fact that it did take vulnerable people to a page full of safety and self-protection information.

Complaints about the way Facebook bruises its users' privacy have also failed to affect the site's growth. While July was a busy time for the lawyers, it was Facebook's privacy experts who worked late through June.

The company revisited its privacy options yet again, making it apparently easier for users to limit third-party access to their data.

How many concerns this assuaged is debatable, but a coalition of privacy groups said later in the month that more work was needed, and penned an open letter to Zuckerberg.

The group, which included the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Privacy Activism, Privacy Lives and the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, called on Zuckerberg to act on "outstanding privacy problems".

"We are glad to see that Facebook has taken steps in the past weeks to address some of its outstanding privacy problems. However, we are writing to urge you to continue to demonstrate your commitment to the principle of giving users control over how and with whom they share," said the letter.

Facebook looked at its privacy options again, but the spectre of privacy complaints still haunt the firm.

Prior to this, archived instant messaging conversations arose suggesting that Zuckerberg has a really poor view of the privacy rights of others. His words, whether truly reported or not, did nothing to put Facebook members off, and probably never will.

Reaching the 500 million mark shows Facebook is here to stay, but perhaps we can all agree that there is still room for improvement around privacy and content controls before it reaches the next milestone.