Busted: Social Websites Sharing Personal Data

Many popular social networking websites send user information to advertising companies without user consent.

Various social websites including Facebook and MySpace have been caught sending personal data to advertising companies without consent. The information typically contains user names or ID numbers tied to personal profiles being viewed when users click on ads. The info is then sent to said external companies, and could be used to gather additional information such as occupations, real names, family members and their addresses, and more depending on what's actually been made public.

Although many of the social websites defended the collection practice, Facebook and MySpace quickly moved to make changes when questions were brought on by the Wall Street Journal. The Journal said that by Thursday morning, Facebook had already rewritten some of the offending computer code. It also named Google Inc.'s DoubleClick and Yahoo Inc.'s Right Media as two of the data recipients, however both claimed that they were unaware of receiving data from the social networking websites.

"If you are looking at your profile page and you click on an ad, you are telling that advertiser who you are," said Ben Edelman, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School who studies Internet advertising. Edelman was asked by the Journal to review the code of seven sites in question. Now both parties are bringing the Federal Trade Commission into the picture, asking it to investigate Facebook's data-collection practices.

A report on personal data collection was first filed by researchers at AT&T Labs and Worcester Polytechnic Institute last August. The paper pinpointed twelve social websites and detailed how outside companies could collect personal data. Many of the sites confirmed the problem. Unfortunately, the same problem still exists nine months later... except for Facebook.

"We fixed this case as soon as we heard about it," a Facebook spokesperson said.

In addition to Facebook and MySpace, other listed culprits include Hi5, Digg, Xanga, Live Journal, Twitter, and many others. To read the full report, head here.