Social Networking Hit By Privacy Backlash

[mandy]

Aggressive advertising, unwanted friends, and employer-snooping into social networking profiles may dull the edge of being on sites like Facebook and MySpace...

One-time online darlings in social networking have begun to feel the dizzying dehydration of the morning after a really great party. Pushback from several quarters may leave the typical past college age person questioning the sanity of being on such sites...

full article: http://www.webpronews.com/insiderreports...networking

Facebook's "platform" strategy has sparked much online debate and controversy. No one wants to see a return to the miserable days of walled gardens, when you couldn't send a message to an AOL subscriber unless you, too, were a subscriber, and when the only services that made it were the ones that AOL management approved. Those of us on the "real" Internet regarded AOL with a species of superstitious dread, a hive of clueless noobs waiting to swamp our beloved Usenet with dumb flamewars (we fiercely guarded our erudite flamewars as being of a palpably superior grade), the wellspring of an endless geyser of free floppy disks and CDs, the kind of place where the clueless management were willing and able to -- for example -- alienate every Vietnamese speaker on Earth by banning the use of the word "Phuc" (a Vietnamese name) because naughty people might use it to evade the chatroom censors' blocks on the f-bomb.

Facebook is no paragon of virtue. It bears the hallmarks of the kind of pump-and-dump service that sees us as sticky, monetizable eyeballs in need of pimping...

full article: http://www.informationweek.com/news/show...=204203573

[mandy]

More Facebook privacy concerns:

A Computer Associates security researcher is sounding the alarm that Facebook's controversial Beacon online ad system goes much further than anyone has imagined in tracking people's Web activities outside the popular social networking site.

Beacon will report back to Facebook on members' activities on third-party sites that participate in Beacon even if the users are logged off from Facebook and have declined having their activities broadcast to their Facebook friends...

full article: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,140182...ticle.html