Social Networks Leaking Users Data To Tracking Sites
Greetings from Siddharth Rao’s blog! In today’s post – I’m going to talk about how most (if not all) of the Social Networking sites out there can leak user-specific data to tracking sites; and thereby to third-party companies/people. On how many Social Networking sites do you have your profiles?
Now-a-days, almost everyone has a profile on at least one of the major social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, Twitter, etc. Also, most users tend to put in a lot of information about themselves on their profiles. This includes information about their likes, dislikes, current status, academic history, employment history, pictures, etc. It goes without saying that all this information can be used extensively to study the behavior of that user online; and then use it for marketing or anything else.
Most popular social networking sites (including Facebook, Twitter, Orkut, etc.) tend to make personal information available to companies that track the browsing habits of its users. According to a new study by the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), this allows them to link anonymous browsing habits to specific people.
“When you sign up with a social networking site, you are assigned a unique identifier,” says Craig Wills, professor of computer science at WPI.
“This is a string of numbers or characters that points to your profile. We found that when social networking sites pass information to tracking sites about your activities, they often include this unique identifier. So now a tracking site not only has a profile of your Web browsing activities, it can link that profile to the personal information you post on the social networking site. Now your browsing profile is not just of somebody, it is of you.”
While there is no direct harm with this information leak, it can vary significantly from person to person. Please take some time to take a look at your profile and check for yourself to see what information you think is not necessary to be in there. Safeguard your information using correct privacy settings. Most social networking sites give you full control on what part of your profile you want to make visible to the public. Be sure to use those features for your own good.
Remember – once you post something online for public use, it’s public forever. Even if you delete your profile; there are several archival sites on the internet which archive the content forever. It can be a heck of a hassle (and sometimes almost impossible) to trace it and delete it later.
You can read the full article on this topic - here
That’s it for now. The contest that I mentioned in my previous blog post – is still in the works. Stay tuned – it will be coming soon!
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