Facebook Makes Privacy Policy Easier to Read

Firms can trace users' identities, jobs, sex preferences

(NEWSER) - Despite promises to the contrary, Facebook and MySpace are supplying information to advertisers that can be used to find an individual's name, age, hometown and occupation, reports the Wall Street Journal . Typically on the Web, advertisers receive nothing more than an unintelligible string of letters and numbers "identifying" an Internet surfer who has clicked on an ad. On Facebook and other social networking sites, however, those addresses typically include user names that can lead advertisers back to a profile page that may be packed with personal details like sexual preferences. More»

Recognize that face in an ad? It could be your friend—or you.

(NEWSER) - Imagine Peter Smith’s surprise when an ad for “hot singles” on Facebook featured a picture of … his wife. The site blames that flap on a third-party company violating policy, but the incident underscores Facebook’s notoriously unclear privacy settings, writes Bob Sullivan for MSNBC: “A hard-to-spot toggle switch grants the firm, by default, permission to use consumers’ information in advertisements to their friends.” More»

One-quarter of survey respondents admitted to altering their info

(NEWSER) - How to protect your privacy on Facebook? For an increasing number of users, the answer is simple: Lie. A quarter of respondents in a new Consumer Reports study admitted that they “alter personally identifiable information,” such as birthdate, on Facebook. Technically, that’s a violation of the social networking site’s Terms of Service, the New York Times points out. And more than twice as many people are doing it now as were two years ago, when the same question was asked. More»

Maryland may ban practice

(NEWSER) - Some employers and colleges have found an ingenious way around Facebook's pesky privacy settings: Simply demand that applicants or students friend you, give you a tour of their account, or even divulge their usernames and passwords. MSNBC reports on a number of places instituting the troubling practices:

• At Maryland's Department of Corrections, job applicants are asked to log in to their account and allow an interviewer to watch as they click through their photos and posts. The Department of Corrections used to ask for username and password outright, but stopped after an ACLU complaint last year.
• Colleges are requiring student athletes to "friend" a coach or school official so that their Facebook posts can be monitored. If they refuse, they don't play. "Each team must identify at least one coach or administrator who is responsible for having access to and regularly monitoring the content of team members’ social networking sites and postings," reads the University of North Carolina handbook.
• Though social media monitoring seems to take place mostly with student athletes, non-athlete college applicants have reported to one lawyer that they were asked for their login information during interviews.

... and Mark Zuckerberg himself learned the hard way

(NEWSER) - A temporary glitch allowed Facebook users to view others' private photos with a surprisingly easy trick, reports ZDNet . It's been fixed, but not before some of Mark Zuckerberg's own private photos got pilfered and reposted on blogs, like here at Launch. The trick: You could report an image to Facebook as inappropriate and mark the "nudity or pornography" box (even if it wasn't). At that point, Facebook would give you access to other photos in the user's private stream so you could check for more to flag. More»