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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."
Guess the Journal forgot Rupert also owns MySpace.
they were unaware of the data being sent to them from the social-networking sites, and said they haven't made use of it
Ahh, they didn't use it. Then it's all right.
Nothing to see here.
I wonder if TPB could use the same defense. "Wait what? You can SEE the downloaded movies? Whoa!"
Cue the "privacy is dead" asshats, who for some reason are determined to purge the natural human desire for privacy that has existed since the dawn of human evolution.
How quaint. The domain every geek has blocked since 1996.
With all this facebook detritus littering the web, are there some facebook domains and subdomains that need to be blocked, because they are being used for tracking?
People still click on ads?
Is anyone surprised? As soon as companies grow so big that consumers can not easily vote with their wallet anymore, or their offers are non-monetary for the end-user (who is the product, instead of the consumer), there's no reason they would take privacy seriously. I'm pretty sure the bad PR is the only reason they worry about it at all.
In advertisement, all commercial participants conspire against the consumer.
I'm not a friend of government (especially our current one here in Germany, a bunch of monkies could do a better job) - but I don't see which other organisation could regulate these commercial big players anymore. Certainly not the consumers, who despite Internet and all theoretical options of banding together simply have 1000 other things in their lives to worry about, so finding a sufficiently large group of people who care about this particular thing enough to make a difference is as hard as ever.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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
http://xkcd.com/743/
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.
My reading of the WSJ article is that the sites were (perhaps inevitably) passing a referrer URL along when the user clicked the ad. This URL is, naturally, one of the user's pages, and will explicitly or implicitly identify the user. The advertiser can then identify the user's page on the social networking site and retrieve any public information there. The WSJ makes it clear that the information is not passed on directly, which goes some way to explaining why the advertisers claim never to have used it.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
If this is true, then Facebook is committing fraud. Shut them down.
Some people use it as an out; "Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know!"
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetance? Yes, that applies, unless it crosses "never attribute to incompetence that which can be explained by greedy self-interest". That's the razor that applies here; if your "mistake" benefits you, only a fool will believe it's a mistake.
Mr. Brin, I love your search engine, but please change your lying motto.
Free Martian Whores!
Why would I want to use Facebook at all if I value my privacy? And a follow up which is probably more to the point, with all the shit Facebook has pulled, why are you bitching about it if you're still a user?
That final quote is clearly implying that this evidence is proof that we need government intervention. We should strenuously oppose this, and we need to be aware of the subtle messages to try to persuade us to change our minds. Don't give into the manipulation!
In fact, this entire episode is strong and conclusive evidence that we do not need government regulations in this area. The private sector exposed the problem and the companies made the appropriate changes. This is how it should be done. If we don't like a product or service, then we should take our business elsewhere. Facebook is not a right. It is not an entitlement. It is a website, people, and you are free to go and use a different website if you choose. Perhaps if more people did, Facebook would clean up their act. We need to regulate the Internet not the government. I would rather keep the government as far from the Internet as possible for my own peace of mind. They have enough power to be corrupted without giving them more.
How can putting a corrupt and greedy government in charge of regulating the Internet possibly be a good thing?
Somehow, I don't buy it, and it makes me sad that Google has gone this far down the path of Corporatism.
Now, they lie to us to our faces. I find it impossible to believe that Google did not know what was in the strings being sent to it.
Google is trying to tell us that they are so incompetent that they did not realize what all that information in the strings that were sent to it actually signified.
Right.
Either their hiring practices scrape the bottom of the barrel (which we know is not true), or they knew exactly what information was in all those strings, since that's their job. Collecting and analyzing information (of which those URLs are a subset).
Oh, I know. Since we are in a free market economy you can just not use Google at all! And any site that has adwords, or google analytics, or youtube, or refuse email of anyone that sends you email from a gmail address, or...
If enough people do this, we can show Google the error their ways. /sarcasm
I don't believe privacy exists really anymore
That is the same as "privacy is dead", making you one of the asshats that AC was talking about.
Are your facebook friends so lazy that they wouldn't reply, if you sent them a good old fashioned email? I hope not, but just in case, there is a secret weapon.
Federated XMPP. Your backdoor into facebook's walled garden, without actually having to give in and be their bitch.
And let's see if advertisers will continue to be interested in your personal info after that... Hopefully sometime in the near future, when this or similar fan pages will grow large enough, advertisers will start excluding people that belong to them.
I don't mind dating a girl that has been with everybody, as long as she had a good shower afterwards.
> 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.
Yeah, right.
If you look closely at Google/Yahoo advertising tags - they are proactively trying to catch (via Javascript) and log (in GET parameters to their server) current URL to which their ads are served. Unless you fake referer AND use NoScript extension, you're giving them this data. And I have a strong diesbelief that they do not store this data.
Yahoo and Google are logging huge part of your Web browsing history this way.
I guess they've coded it by accident?
There's also the open source privacy scanner:
http://www.reclaimprivacy.org/facebook
Think politicians!
People will soon be polled with questions that are specifically targeted to THEM!
Voters will become infinitely more manipulable--to the politicians backed by rich people.
Not pretty.
Social media sites that make money by selling the information you give them actually sell the information you give them...
News at 11
Yes... and even if geeks and privacy fans manage to avoid being in the particular set of data, who cares... there are plenty of folks (one borne every minute) who have happily posted lots of stuff on FB, etc... It's a gold-mine of demographic data, only an idiot (or someone with ethics) would pass up the chance to use that data to Make Money Fast.
Time to Update Barnum's Philosophy for the 21st Century: 'It is morally wrong to allow a sucker to keep their money or their privacy'
http://visualizecommonsense.com/