There has been quite a bit of coverage in the national media and blogosphere lately regarding the recent issues surrounding Facebook’s troubles with its privacy policies and the outcry from its users about it. While we haven’t really chimed in here at Junkie on the Facebook privacy debate up until now,the Wall Street Journal has broken a story that we simply cannot ignore.
And the ramifications go well beyond Facebook to include a few sites that are probably among your favorites as well.
The Journal reports that Facebook, as well as MySpace, LiveJournal, Digg and a few other social networking sites, have been sharing personal information on their users with some of their advertisers without user knowledge or consent. The shared data includes user names, online IDs and other information that would enable advertising providers to identify unique user profiles and determine things like a user’s hometown, age and occupation.
The story identifies Google’s (GOOG) Double Click and Yahoo’s (YHOO) RightMedia as two of the major advertising outfits included among the recipients of the data, although both said they were unaware that any such information was beings sent to them by social networking sites and denied that they’ve used any data they may have received.
The data-sharing practice was first uncovered almost a year ago, in August 2009, by research teams at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and AT&T Labs in a report that was largely ignored by the mainstream. Those researches shared their concerns with the websites in question but apparently, no steps were taken by any of the sites to make changes until the Journal came to them with questions about what was happening.
What’s even more concerning about this whole situation is that Facebook, the nation’s most popular website with more than 400 million users, apparently took the data-sharing even further than some of the other sites in question. In some cases, Facebook gave to advertisers the exact names and IDs of the users clicking on certain ads, which in turn would allow those advertisers to gather information on the user’s interests. And unlike some social networking sites, Facebook requires users to add their actual names when registering for the site.
All in all, the practice raises some serious privacy concerns for Facebook users, albeit through a fairly simple process, as explained by one expert.
“If you are looking at your profile page and you click on an ad, you are telling that advertiser who you are,” says Ben Edelman, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School and internet advertising researcher, who has contacted the Federal Trade Commission requesting they investigate Facebook’s specific practices when it comes to user privacy.
If it turns out that Facebook in particular was sharing information with advertisers in direct conflict with its own privacy protocols, it will only add to mounting user frustration and at times, anger, over the site’s privacy practices. Facebook has already been pushing users to make more of their profile information available for public consumption, which drew a whole separate round of backlash from the FTC all on its own. And all of these developments have arisen while Facebook users struggle to navigate the sites’ complicated privacy controls.
Obviously, this is a story that will continue to unfold as the FTC and perhaps others get involved and look at Facebook and other social networking sites for possible privacy violations. But it’s certainly not a good sign that this news is coming to light on the heels of so many other privacy issues for Facebook in particular. We’ll keep tabs on this issue as news emerges but as always, leave us your thoughts and comments below!
