Facebook 2012 Annual Report Download - page 15

•Safety. We design our products to include safety tools. These tools are coupled with educational
resources and partnerships with online safety experts to offer protections for all users, particularly
teenagers. We take into account the unique needs of teenagers who use our service and employ age-
appropriate settings that restrict their visibility, limit the audience with whom they can share, and help
prevent unwanted contact from strangers.
Our abuse reporting infrastructure allows anyone on Facebook to report inappropriate, offensive, or
dangerous content through “report” links found throughout our site. We have enhanced this reporting
system to include “Social Reporting,” which gives users the option to report content to us, to report
content to a trusted friend, or to block the person who posted the content with one easy-to-use tool. Our
Safety Advisory Board, comprised of five leading online safety organizations from around the world,
advises us on product design and helps us to create comprehensive safety resources for everyone who
uses our service. These resources are located in our multimedia Family Safety Center on our website,
which also offers special information for parents, educators, teenagers, and members of the law
enforcement community. Additionally, we work with law enforcement to help promote the safety of
our users as required by law.
•Security. We invest in technology, processes, and people as part of our commitment to safeguarding
our users’ information. We use a variety of techniques to protect the data that we are entrusted with,
and we rely on multiple layers of network segregation using firewalls to protect against attacks or
unauthorized access. We also employ proprietary technologies to protect our users. For example, if we
suspect that a user’s account may have been compromised, we may use a process that we refer to as
“social authentication” to validate that the person accessing the account is the actual account holder.
The process of social authentication may include asking the person accessing the account to identify
photos of the account holder’s friends. Our security team actively scans for security vulnerabilities
using commercial tools, penetration tests, code security reviews, and internal and external audits. We
also have a network of geographically distributed single-tenant data centers, and we take measures to
protect the information stored in these data centers.
Competition
Our business is characterized by innovation, rapid change, and disruptive technologies. We face significant
competition in every aspect of our business, including from companies that provide tools to facilitate the sharing
of information, that enable marketers to display personalized advertising and that provide development platforms
for application- developers. We compete with the following:
• Companies that offer full-featured products that replicate the range of communications and related
capabilities we provide. These offerings include, for example, Google+, which Google has integrated
with certain of its products, including search and Android, as well as other, largely regional, social
networks that have strong positions in particular countries, such as Mixi in Japan and vKontakte and
Odnoklassniki in Russia.
• Companies that develop applications, particularly mobile applications, that replicate discrete
capabilities we provide, such as photo-sharing, messaging, and micro-blogging.
• Companies that provide web- and mobile-based information and entertainment products and services
that are designed to engage users.
• Companies that offer platforms for game developers to reach broad audiences with free-to-play games
including Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android mobile platforms.
• Traditional and online businesses that provide media for marketers to reach their audiences and/or
develop tools and systems for managing and optimizing advertising campaigns.
We compete to attract, engage, and retain users, to attract and retain marketers, to attract and retain
developers to build compelling apps and websites that integrate with Facebook, and to attract and retain highly
talented individuals, especially software engineers, designers, and product managers.
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