Facebook 2013 Annual Report Download - page 11

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9
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.
• 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, companies that
enable marketers to display advertising, and companies that provide development platforms for application developers. We compete
to attract, engage, and retain users, to attract and retain marketers, to attract and retain developers to build compelling mobile and web
applications that integrate with Facebook, and to attract and retain highly talented individuals, especially software engineers, designers,
and product managers.
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.
• Companies that develop applications, particularly mobile applications, that provide social functionality, such as messaging,
photo- and video-sharing, and micro-blogging.
• Companies that provide web- and mobile-based information and entertainment products and services that are designed
to engage users and capture time spent online and on mobile devices.
• 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.
As we introduce new products, as our existing products evolve, or as other companies introduce new products and services,
we may become subject to additional competition.
Technology
We have assembled a team of highly skilled engineers and computer scientists whose expertise spans a broad range of technical
areas. We make significant investments in product and feature development, data management and personalization technologies, large-
scale systems and scalable infrastructure, mobile technologies, and advertising technologies, including:
• Product and Feature Development. We aim to improve our existing products continuously and to develop new products
for our users, developers, and marketers. Our product development philosophy is centered on continuous innovation in
creating products that are social by design, which means that our products are designed to place people and their social
interactions at the core of the product experience.
• Data Management and Personalization Technologies. To provide each user with a personalized Facebook experience,
we must process and analyze a significant amount of content shared by our users, developers, and marketers and surface
the most relevant content in real time. As such, we invest extensively in developing technologies and analytics in areas