MySpace to be Watched for 20 Years by Federal Government. Should MySpace last the next 20 years, it'll have at least one close observer: the federal government.
MySpace's privacy practices will be kept under close watch by a third-party observer for two decades as part of a settlement related to an investigation of the company's advertising sales strategy, the FTC announced Tuesday. The agreement also prevents MySpace from making "future privacy misrepresentations" and requires it to make significant changes to its privacy policy. MySpace will also have to turn over internal documents and other information about its privacy practices for the next five years. The FTC first targeted MySpace on the belief that the company was selling information about its users to advertising clients, which violates the website's terms of use. According to the FTC's charge, MySpace violated those terms by providing advertisers with the Friend ID number of users looking at certain pages on the site. The FTC also alleged that MySpace ran afoul of a U.S. Facebook And The Job Interview: What Employers Should Be Doing.
Social Media Privacy: 3 Questions to Ask Before Authorizing Third-Party Apps. Hey Teacher (And Employer), Leave Those Facebook Passwords Alone.
How Facebook Tracks Its Users. For the first time, Facebook has revealed details about how it tracks users across the web.
Through interviews with Facebook engineering director Arturo Bejar, Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes, Facebook corporate spokesman Barry Schnitt and Facebook engineering manager Gregg Stefancik, USA Today's Byron Acohido was able to compile the most complete picture to date of how the social network keeps tabs on its 800 million users. Here is what Acohido learned: Facebook doesn't track everybody the same way. It uses different methods for members who have signed in and are using their accounts, members who are logged-off and non-members.The first time you arrive at any Facebook.com page, the company inserts cookies in your browser.
If you sign up for an account, it inserts two types of cookies. Data about web searches and browsing habits could be used to figure out political affiliations, religious beliefs, sexual orientations or health issues about consumers. Facebook Privacy Dwarfed By Google: Infographic. Google less privacy aware than Facebook? - Security. Google+ encourages users to give out information that could compromise their security and its privacy selling point — its circles — are actually a subset of Facebook's friends lists, according to researchers from the University College London in the UK.
In their paper, Preliminary Analysis of Google+'s Privacy (PDF), the two researchers, Shah Mahmood and Yvo Desmedt, compare some of the privacy features of Facebook and Google+, including the use of friends lists and circles to maintain privacy settings. They claim that "Facebook lists are a superset of Google+ circles, both functionally and logically, even though Google+ provides a better user interface". So, What Are These Privacy Audits That Google And Facebook Have To Do For The Next 20 Years?
Congressmen Wary of Facebook Patent That Seeks to Track User Information.