Mark Zuckerberg is TIME Magazine's Person of the Year? Where's the "dislike" button? As for Person of the Year, we couldn't find the dislike button on Facebook for TIME's choice, so we made our own. Here's our version of the magazine: Unfortunately, the terms under which he claims to have done this set a terrible precedent for our future — for our control over the software we use to interact with each other, for control over our data, and for our privacy. The damage is not limited to Facebook users. Because so many sites — including TIME — use Facebook's user-tracking "Like" button, Zuckerberg is able to collect information about people who aren't even users of his site.
These are precedents which hurt our ability to freely connect with each other. He has created a network that is first and foremost a gold mine for government surveillance and advertisers. This much is evident from Facebook's outward behavior — but things could actually be much worse than we know. These efforts will eventually succeed. Copy and paste this code for your own website! WSJ: Facebook, MySpace & Others Share Identifying User Data With. A report in the Wall Street Journal this evening reveals that Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and a number of other popular social sites are passing along data that advertisers could potentially use to identify users who click their ads. The article is focused on Facebook in particular, which appears to have been passing along the most data of the aforementioned sites and has also been embroiled in a major privacy controversy. The Journal article doesn’t get into too much technical detail, but it sounds like Facebook and the others are failing to scrub ‘referring’ URLs that are always passed along whenever a user clicks a link.
This is actually normal behavior — typically when you click a link on a website, the site you’re being directed to will get to see where you came from. Update: Jessica Vascellaro, one of the writers on the WSJ article, has sent ReadWriteWeb more technical details on what Facebook was doing. Her explanation, in part (you can see the full thing here): Facebook Privacy Makes The Cover of Time Magazine. Busted: Facebook Gave Advertisers Names And Ages Of People Who C. Unbelievable: WSJ Calls Facebook's Referring URLs a Privacy Viol. In a jaw dropping move of bizarreness, Wall St. Journal writers Emily Steel and Jessica E. Vascellaro have called out major social networking websites tonight for violating user privacy apparently by passing profile page URLs to advertisers as the referring URLs when users click on ads. We've emailed both writers to ask for clarification in the event that they are in fact referring to something else, but haven't heard back from them yet.
Update: Vascellaro has responded by email, emphasizing an apparently now-resolved if legitimate issue discussed vaguely as "in some cases" in the original story. Conflating that and the simple matter of referring URLs seems odd, to say the least. "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 article begins. It's just incredible. That's right. Facebook, MySpace referring URLs not much of a privacy breach | Overnight, the Wall Street Journal reported what sounds like yet another breach of privacy at Facebook. The Journal cited MySpace as an offender, too. What you need to know is that while the leaked info has indeed been leaked, no one has been found to have put it to use. Facebook has already fixed its offending code, which accidentally submitted user account information to advertising networks when users clicked on ads.
MySpace will probably do the same soon. Even then, as pundit Matthew Ingram put it, “On a scale of 1 to 10 privacy-wise, this is probably around a 1 or a 2.” Here’s the 100-word version of the Journal’s story: Most social networks, the Journal says, “haven’t bothered” to scrub usernames and account ID numbers from URLs. It’s meant to help site B figure out where its traffic is coming from. Instead of piling on this latest privacy angle against Facebook, technology news sites ReadWriteWeb and GigaOm have declared the Journal’s story overblown.