Facebook caught sharing secret data with advertisers

The privacy issues that have been hounding Facebook may be coming to a head. A report in the Wall Street Journal indicates that the Facebook, along with MySpace, Digg, and a handful of other social-networking sites, have been sharing users’ personal data with advertisers without users’ knowledge or consent.

The data shared includes names, user IDs, and other information sufficient to enable ad companies such as the Google-owned DoubleClick to identify distinct user profiles. Some of the sites in question, including MySpace and Facebook, stopped sharing the data after the Journal asked them about it. The surreptitious data sharing was first noticed (PDF) by researchers from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and AT&T Labs in August 2009, who brought it up with the sites in question. It wasn’t until WSJ contacted them that changes were made.

Not surprisingly, Facebook appears to have gone farther than the other sites when it comes to sharing data. When Facebook’s users clicked on ads appearing on a profile page, the site would at times provide data such as the username behind the click, as well as the user whose profile page from which the click came. “If you are looking at your profile page and you click on an ad, you are telling that advertiser who you are,” Harvard Business School professor Ben Edelman told the Journal. Advertisers contacted by the paper said that they were unaware of the additional data and did not make use of it.

Facebook has tweaked its privacy policy throughout its history, with the most recent moves to open up more user information to the public drawing heavy criticism and FTC complaints. Users have also had a tough timenavigating the site’s often-Byzantine privacy controls, which has led to a trickle of user defections. With these latest revelations about Facebook ignoring industry standards, not to mention its own privacy policies, that trickle may turn into a torrent.

Article by Eric Bangeman @ Ars Technica

 

I really think Lee Lefever at Commoncraft has done an amazing job at creating useful videos explaining products.  As he says, our product is explanation!  Here is another great video from commoncraft on RSS. RSS in Plain English.

Flickr, a leading photo sharing and social media site, has announced they now have had 3 billion photos uploaded to its service.  It has shown a 50% growth rate from nearly a year ago announcing its 2 billionth photo uploaded.

Although impressive, Flickr is still lagging behind the #1 photo sharing site: Facebook.  Facebook announced last month its 10 billionth member photo.

Flickr, acquired by Yahoo in 2005 for 35 million, has proven itself one of the finest acquisitions made in the Web 2.0 era.  Youtube was acquired by google for 1.6 billion and Facebook received a 15 billion valuation from Microsoft when it purchased a $240 million dollar stake in the company.

America Online continues to tighten its belt with the announcement of its discontinuing the services of AOL Pictures, BlueString, and XDrive.  AOL will begin notifying customers next week.  AOL had discontinued AOL journals and AOL Hometown earlier this summer.

All three products will go offline in December, however, AOL customers that have photos on AOL pictures will be able to access them until June 2009.

The company is clearly looking to shave budgets by eliminating money losing products.

With the closing of some of its more interesting social media apps, the current economic climate, and Yahoo’s 64 percent drop in profits and 10% cut in workforce, the rumor mill is active again about a possible AOL-YAHOO merger….

With all the chatter over the past weeks about the decline and fall of the economy, and how it will affect emerging web20/Social Media technologies, I did a quick check on Alexa to see how the top ten social media sites are faring.  I was a little surprised that some of the “hot” tools like twitter, digg, delicious etc. were not there, but, here they are non the less.  I did try to stick to social/new media sites and did leave out the big boys (google, yahoo, live, etc) because their global top 5 rankings remains unchallenged.  I wil try to put together a larger list of social media sites and their rankings shortly.

 

#1. Youtube – The holder of the #3 spot globally and #4 ranking in the US.  Youtube has seen a 6% drop in reach over the past 3 months while seeing their page views increase slightly by 2%.  It is estimated that approximately 489,059 sites link to youtube.co

 

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#2. Facebook – Facebook currently holds the #5 spot globally as well as in the US.  Face book clearly is still gaining traction and has a 17% in growth in reach over the last three months while seeing slowdown in pageviews(down 7%) Facebook has about 155,220 sites that link to it.

 

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#3 MySpace – Myspace is ranked #7 globally and #3 within the US.  Myspace has seen an 11% decline in reach over the past 3 months as well as a decline in pageviews of 9%.  Myspace currently has about 335,770 sites linking to it.

 

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#4. Wikipedia.org – Wikipedia is currently ranked #8 globally as well as #8 in the US.  Wikipedia has seen a 12% decline over the past 3 months as well as a decline in pageviews at about 7%.  Wikipedia has 364,081 sites linking to it.

 

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#5. Blogger.com – blooger is a google property and has a global ranking of #9 and a US ranking of #12.  They have seen a 10% decrease in reach over the past 3 months with an increase in pageviews of 3%

 

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#6. Hi5.com – Hi5 is based out of San Francisco and has a global ranking of #16 and a US ranking of #70.  The interesting thing to note here is although they are a US based company their top ranking comes from  Indonesia at #2.  Hi5 has seen a 4% drop in global reach and a 8% drop in pageviews.

 

 

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#7. Wordpress.com – Wordpress has a global ranking of #28 and a US ranking of #23.  Wordpress has seen an increase in reach of 1% and an increase in pageviews of 3%.  There are 135,535 sites that link to wordpress.com.

 

 

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#8. Flickr.com – Canadian based flickr.com ranks #31 globally and #19 in the US.  Reach has remained unchanged over the past 3 months, while pageviews decreased 5%.  Flickr has seen a ranking increase of +5 over the past 3 months. Flickr has 236,171 sites that link to it.

 

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#9. Craigslist.org - craigslist has a global ranking of #38 and a US ranking of #11.  92% of their traffic is from the US.  Craigslist has seen a 3% drop in reach and an increase of 2% in pageviews and increase of +2 in rankings.  There are 9,587 links to craigslist.

 

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#10. Friendster.com – Friendster has a global rank of #39 and a US rank of #151.  Here is another site that is based in the US but has the largest audience from Indonesia(38%) vs a US audience of 7.1%  Friendster has seen a decrease in reach of 9%, a decrease in page rank -1, and an increase in pageviews of 5%.

Cone release today the 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study Fact Sheet.  The survey presents the findings of an online survey managed by Opinion research corporation across 1, 092 adults comprising of 525 men and 565 Women 18 years of ager and older.

Social Media was defined as : Technology facilitated dialogue among individuals or groups, such as blogs/microblogs, forums, wikis, content sharing, social networking, social bookmarking and social gaming.

Among the findings were approximately 59% of Americans have interacted with companies on a social media website over a years time.  59% ? Wow, that seems like an awfully high number, which begs the question, what exactly defines “interacting” with a company or brand on a social media website?  Are people really reporting “interaction” with a company or is this really a reflection on actually visits to social media sites.  I would also have liked to have seen a breakdown in age groups.  Was the population size skewed to 18-30 year olds?  Are the baby boomers and seniors now interacting at a higher rate than last year?

In the study, it reports:

• 13% – Interact 2 or more times a week
• 12% – Interact Once a week
• 13% – Interact 1-2 times a month
• 21% – Interact a few times a year