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Facebook, Others Giving User Private Data To Advertisers
superapecommando sends along a Wall Street Journal report that indicates that Facebook's privacy troubles may be just beginning. "Facebook, MySpace, and several other social networking sites have been sending data to advertising companies that could be used to find consumers' names and other personal details, despite promises they don't share such information without consent. The practice, which most of the companies defended, sends user names or ID numbers tied to personal profiles being viewed when users click on ads. After questions were raised by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook and MySpace moved to make changes. By Thursday morning Facebook had rewritten some of the offending computer code. ... Several large advertising companies ... including Google Inc.'s DoubleClick and Yahoo Inc.'s Right Media, said they were unaware of the data being sent to them from the social networking sites, and said they haven't made use of it. ... The sites may have been breaching their own privacy policies as well as industry standards. ... Those policies have been put forward by advertising and Internet companies in arguments against the need for government regulation."
So Facebook and MySpace were just doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, not making any extra money from Google & Yahoo?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Yes I never understood those asshats. It's like a false "monochotomy".
I don't have a facebook account, and I don't have any idiot farmville playing friends, that would violate my privacy. Therefore I have opted out of facebook. Hey, that wasn't hard.
Oh and I'm using the friend 1.0 definition, ie: people I know with mutual trust, as opposed to the friend 2.0 definition of linked social networking profiles who have poked and bitten each other in the last 6 months.
I often search for my name in a futile attempt to remove myself from the internet. I just checked the other day and noticed some person search company, intellius or something has aquired my myspace profile, pics of my friends etc. I have had myspace account closed for at least 3 years if not longer. When I attempted to figure out what was going on by logging into myspace I couldn't even get in... my account was closed. All I know is I'm giving my kids a helping hand when it comes to their first entrance onto the web. Bunch of information vampires out there.
While I've "closed" my Facebook (seriously, why there isn't a true close account option?) for privacy reasons, lets look at it on technical terms. It's a problem with the referrer field being sent by browsers, nothing intentional on Facebook's part. If you have referrer sending disabled you aren't affected by this.
It's a bad combination of browsers sending referrer, Facebook using real names for everything and Facebook not providing enough privacy options to hide your profile, and Facebook not using https or iframing the ad box (in that case referrer would just show something like http://www.facebook.com/ads/ ).
I guess those ad networks don't actually have something that gets the personal info for clicks, but it's a possibility and I bet the referrer is saved, at least in logs and statistics.
Of course, majority of people don't care so business will continue as usual.