It is perhaps ironic that Twitter’s censorship announcement and Google’s privacy updating came in the week that Canada, along with many other countries, was celebrating Data Privacy Day.

The moves by Twitter and Google underscored just how much people are willing to give up in return for getting free online services. And if that wasn’t enough evidence, we have Facebook now making its Timeline mandatory for its 800 million users.

Privacy is the currency that they are trading and companie...

Continue reading ...

Computer security experts are warning that Facebook users divulge too much personal information which can potentially be accessed by criminals.

Cyber criminals can use this information to steal people's identities and commit fraud in their name.

IT security consultant Rob Vaughan, who spoke about cyber crime at the University of Glamorgan in Pontypridd on Tuesday, said people should think twice before adding details like their address and date of birth to their Facebook page.

"You can change ...

Continue reading ...

LAS VEGAS--Facebook's online privacy woes are well-known. But here's an offline one: its massive database of profile photos can be used to identify you as you're walking down the street.

A Carnegie Mellon University researcher today described how he assembled a database of about 25,000 photographs taken from students' Facebook profiles. Then he set up a desk in one of the campus buildings and asked willing volunteers to peer into Webcams.

The results: facial recognition software put a name to t...

Continue reading ...

Facebook has a problem with privacy--but it makes sense.

By Jared Newman PC World

Once again, Facebook has messed with users' privacy in the name of a new feature.

The latest controversy is over Facebook facial recognition, which can automatically tag friends in photos just by matching the image to a massive database of faces.

Face recognition is a useful, time-saving feature -- at least when it works. But it's also a creepy addition to Facebook that opts you in automatically. As my colleague...

Continue reading ...

A new bill proposed in California could force Facebook and other social networking sites to strip out personal information for children at a parent's request. 

SB 242 -- also known as the Social Networking Privacy Act -- would require Facebook and others to carefully police which pieces of information on individuals under age 18 are accessible to the public. It would also provide a means for concerned parents to demand that a site take down their children's information, or face stiff fines as...

Continue reading ...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Facebook is temporarily disabling a feature that gave app developers access to some of the most sensitive personal data it possesses: Members' addresses and phone numbers.

The company had slipped the feature in quietly, announcing it at the end of last week in a post on its developer blog. But late Monday, Facebook said it is suspending the feature until it can fine-tune how it works. "Over the weekend, we got some useful feedback that we could make people more clearly ...

Continue reading ...

Facebook has made it possible for app developers to get access to users' mobile numbers and addresses, if they obtain permission.

"Because this is sensitive information, we have created the new user address and user mobile phone permissions," wrote Jeff Bowen of the company's developer support team on the Facebook Developers blog on Friday. "These permissions must be explicitly granted to your application by the user via our standard permissions dialogs."

The blog noted that developers can only...

Continue reading ...

There is an old question meant to open a door into the human character: If you found a $100 note on the sidewalk, would you keep it if you felt sure no one saw you, or would you try to track down its owner?

But that question is becoming superfluous, because in our hyper-fast information age, it’s more likely you’ll end up on YouTube through the growing presence of video — especially if you’re in an urban area where security cameras abound. Or perhaps, if you’re one of the 175 millio...

Continue reading ...

Beset with privacy problems in the past, Facebook faces scrutiny over its new messaging system.

After Facebook's struggle with one privacy issue after another this year, some in the industry are raising privacy questions about Facebook's new messaging system.

On Monday, the social network unveiled Facebook Messages, a system designed to handle the convergence of different kinds of messages -- e-mail, instant messaging, SMS and Facebook messages -- and bring them together under one social umbr...

Continue reading ...

Following an embarrassing expose in the Wall Street Journal, Facebook has tightened its controls over the ways in which applications that use the social networking platform can share unique user identity information (or UIDs). The company also banned several applications accused of improperly disclosing user data. 

The company outlined its new policy in a post on Facebook's Developer's blog on Friday by Mike Vernal, a company engineer. Facebook has adopted a "zero tolerance" policy for data b...

Continue reading ...

Facebook's privacy problems are like a centipede with footwear issues. "Other" shoes keep dropping, and there seems to be no end of them.

Lately Facebook's problems have been fueled by Wall Street Journal reporters peeking under the sheets to see what kind of shenanigans Facebook has been up to. That's how we learned Facebook apps have been inadvertently sharing user identities with advertisers, and the personal profiles culled from Facebook data by companies like Rapleaf can get very specifi...

Continue reading ...

By  Chloe Albanesius In the wake of a controversy surrounding the security of Facebook user IDs, the social-networking site on Friday admitted that several of its developers sold UIDs to data brokers. "As we examined the circumstances of inadvertent UID transfers, we discovered some instances where a data broker was paying developers for UIDs," Facebook engineer Mike Vernal wrote in a blog post. Private user data was not sold, Vernal said. Facebook has since suspended the developers for ...

Continue reading ...

Facebook Inc. said that a data broker has been paying application developers for identifying user information, and that it had placed some developers on a six-month suspension from its site because of the practice.

The announcement, which Facebook made on its developers' blog Friday, follows an investigation by Facebook into a privacy breach that The Wall Street Journal reported in October.

Some "apps," the small programs that let users play games or share information with each other on the ...

Continue reading ...

Facebook doesn’t just have its own movie it has its own reality show. Nearly weekly, sensational stories have been popping up which go beyond Zuckerberg’s personality to real privacy issues important to consumers. The latest news has Facebook exposed for lobbying California politicians against the Social Networking Privacy Act. A story which offers companies a serious lesson in lobbying.

Facebook spent a rather paltry sum of $6,600 to defeat a bill titled The Social Networking Privacy Ac...

Continue reading ...

U.S. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller pressed executives of Facebook Inc. and MySpace Inc. for information about breaches involving personal information and vowed to write legislation protecting privacy.

Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, said he is troubled by reports that users of the sites had personal details transferred to third-parties without their knowledge.

“I intend to find out whether today’s social-networking sites are adequately protecting their users’ p...

Continue reading ...

Firesheep, a new extension for the Firefox browser, lets users eavesdrop on unencrypted traffic over unsecured wifi networks

A new extension for the Firefox web browser makes it easier than ever before for users to steal account information from users logging on to unencrypted websites via unsecured wifi networks. Developed by Eric Butler, the Firesheep extension collects the “cookies” that a selection of websites such as Facebook and Twitter use to allow access, and then allows users to �...

Continue reading ...

Only these are ones that haven't actually happened yet

 How private is private information when you have a profile on the most far-reaching social networks in the world?  Apparently, it’s all but meaningless, according to two recently published academic papers that find that under certain circumstances, advertisers can access a wealth of private and sensitive information on Facebook, including relationship status and sexual orientation, the New York Timesreported Saturday.

In one experiment, ...

Continue reading ...

Last week, it was discovered that numerous Facebook apps were leaking user data to third-party companies, prompting the social network’s engineers to draft a proposal for encrypting user IDs. Now we’re seeing reports that a similar leak has occurred at MySpace, but the truth is that almost any social network could potentially have this problem.

MySpace has tried to position itself as a privacy-friendly alternative to Facebook. Earlier this year, it made “friends only” the default setti...

Continue reading ...

Facebook has had an awkward week or so in the limelight, with the debut of "The Social Network," a none-too-complimentary movie about the social-media behemoth's origins. So the last thing that company founder Mark Zuckerberg needs is a new way to tick off Facebook's legions of users.

But that, apparently, is just what Zuckerberg and his no-doubt bone-weary damage-control team are going to have to deal with. The culprit in this case is Facebook's new Groups application, a feature that Yahoo! t...

Continue reading ...

Facebook is scrambling to fix a bug in its website that could be misused by spammers to harvest user names and photographs.

It turns out that if someone enters the e-mail address of a Facebook user along with the wrong password, Facebook returns a special "Please re-enter your password" page, which includes the Facebook photo and full name of the person associated with the address.

The feature helps people understand if they've mistyped their e-mail address at login, but it could be misused by ...
Continue reading ...

CLEVELAND - Dread of the unknown hung in the air as Lynn France typed two words into the search box on Facebook: the name of the woman with whom she believed her husband was having an affair.

Click. And there it was, the stuff of nightmares for any spouse, cuckolded or not. Wedding photos. At Walt Disney World, no less, featuring her husband literally dressed as Prince Charming. His new wife, a pretty blonde, was a glowing Sleeping Beauty, surrounded by footmen.

"I was numb with shock...

Continue reading ...

Facebook users were hit with another frightening reminder on Thursday that not everyone online is their friend, as over 100 million personal profiles and details from the service were scraped from the service's pages and published on the Web.
fox news

The most dramatic "data theft" to hit social networks in quite a while isn't a theft at all.

Facebook users were hit with another frightening reminder on Thursday that not everyone online is their friend, as over 100 million personal profiles and d...
Continue reading ...

Social network providers can be as reckless as the users who Tweet and Facebook their way into hackers' hands. Bill Brenner lists some examples in this latest edition of Security Wisdom Watch.

I usually present Security Wisdom Watch as a list of thumbs up and down, but this month it's all thumbs down, thanks to the recent state of affairs in the social media world.

This is a sequel of sorts to a column I wrote last week called "Social Stupidity: Am I too social (LinkedIn, so to speak) to ...

Continue reading ...

Facebook will be fighting these attacks right until the end.

Recently, Facebook was victim of a phishing attack having enough potential to attack 200 million Facebook accounts. It's barely been a week since then and  yet another phishing attack bothers Facebook.

The new attack sends sends an email message with subject "Hello" to the victim with body text asking to visit an obscure URL with .at domain name - areps.at , kirgo.at and so on. Do not visit those links. We repeat, DO NOT visit those l...
Continue reading ...

By SARAH PEREZ of ReadWriteWeb

In December, Facebook made a series of bold and controversial changes regarding the nature of its users' privacy on the social networking site. The company once known for protecting privacy to the point of exclusivity (it began its days as a network for college kids only - no one else even had access), now seemingly wants to compete with more open social networks like the microblogging media darling Twitter.

Those of you who edited your privac...

Continue reading ...