| Got an e-mail list of customers or readers and want to know more about each — such as their full name, friends, gender, age, interests, location, job and education level? |
a marketer could take a list of 1,000 email addresses, either legally or illegally collected — and upload those through a dummy account — which then lets the user see all the profile created using those addresses. Given Facebook’s ubiquity and most people’s reliance on a single e-email address, the harvest could be quite rich.
Using a simple scraping tool, a marketer could then turn a list of email addresses into a rich, full-fledged set of markeing profiles, with names, pictures, ages, locations, interests, photos, wall posts, affiliations and names of your friends, depending on how users have their profiles set. Run a few algorithms on that data and you can start to make inferences about race, income, sexual orientation, and interests.
While that information isn’t available for all users, Facebook changed its privacy settings in early December so that certain information can’t be made private, including one’s name, current city, profile picture, gender, networks and friend list (the latter can be somewhat hidden from public view). Read more at www.wired.com |
10 major privacy groups plan to demand new privacy legislation from Congress regarding online behavioral tracking and ad targeting.
The roster of groups is a who’s who in consumer and privacy circles: Consumers Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Consumer Federation of America, U.S. Public Interest Research Group, and others. |
Among the things they’re asking for: No sensitive information (like health or financial information) should be used for behavioral tracking, no one under 18 should be behaviorally tracked, Web sites and ad networks shouldn’t be able to keep behavioral data for more than a day without getting an OK from the individual they’re tracking, and behavioral data can’t be used for discriminatory purposes. Read more at mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com |
Facebookfacebook announced a number of privacy changes this morning to comply with Canadian privacy laws. However, the changes will impact all users – not just those in Canada. |
| here are the most notable issues Facebook plans to address and what users will see: |
Applications will be required to more specifically tell users what type of information they accessing, both from their profile and from those of their friends. |
Facebook will more clearly distinguish between deactivating an account, which keeps your data on the site for potential future reactivation, and deleting it completely. The company also plans to further detail what happens to deceased user’s accounts. |
There will be clearer explanation of how Facebook plans to use certain types of data – like birthdays – and how the company tailors its advertising to specific users. |
| there’s not much to see as of today, but there are some long-term changes in store that address a number of Facebook’s top privacy concerns.Read more at mashable.com |
Facebook has changed its application-programming interface to close a loophole developers were using to write applications based on access to photo albums set to be viewable by everyone.
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| The default for photo albums is “Everyone,” and many people did not realize that unless they manually changed the privacy setting, anyone on the Web could conceivably see their picturesRead more at news.cnet.com |
Mr. Cuomo has announced he intends to sue the company “for deceptive e-mail marketing practices and invasion of privacy,” according to a statement put out by his office. |
Tagged, Mr. Cuomo said, illegally tried to lure new members by tricking visitors into providing their personal address books, which the company used to send out more invitations. Tagged disguised these e-mail messages to make it appear as though a friend was inviting them to view personal photos. |
Tagged’s chief executive, Greg Tseng, posted a response on the company blog. “Today’s announcement by New York Attorney General Cuomo is disheartening. Identify theft and invasion of privacy are very serious allegations and it is not accurate to portray Tagged, or any other social network, in this regard,” he wrote. |
| “In no instance did Tagged access a person’s personal address book without their consent and no emails were sent without the person giving us permission,” he said. Read more at bits.blogs.nytimes.com |
Okay I completely understand the standard background check, you need to know who is going to be working for you. I even understand employers googling prospective employees (This is why I am always mindful to monitor my image online). However, i thing it is outrageous that any company, or a city or that matter, is asking for its applicants to fully disclose their usernames and passwords to all social media profiles. I for one would decide to no longer apply!  We have written quite a bit about the pitfalls of disclosing too much in your social network profiles, especially when it comes to employers accidentally stumbling over your party pictures on Facebook and MySpace. The city of Bozeman, Montana, however, is taking this to a new level by actually asking prospective employees to disclose not just that they have profiles on Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo, Google, and YouTube, but by also asking for the usernames and passwords for these profiles.
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The form (PDF) is a standard waiver that allows the city to perform a background check, which is obviously a routine procedure, but in addition, the city asks prospective employees to “please list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.” The form provides three lines for entering this information. |
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