Facebook Advertisers Can Glean Private Data – NYTimes.com.
Privacy vulnerabilities continue to be revealed on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace reports the NYTimes. The Times describes two research papers which discuss how unethical advertisers can game social networks to determine people’s private profile information like sexual orientation.
Facebook counters that it has tools in place to prevent unethical advertiser behavior. However, Facebook realizes it needs to do more. In fact, Facebook announced that it proposing encrypting user IDs as a way to prevent the sharing of IDs with data brokers. But Facebook admits this will only “address the inadvertent sharing of this information on Facebook.”
Mashable weighs in with the obvious question, “Frankly, we think that encrypting the UID parameters within an iFrame is a good idea and a good first step towards accountability. Our big question is: Why is this only happening now?”
If you are looking for a clearer technical explanation of what the fuss is all about and the limited step Facebook is proposing read Ars Technica’s, Facebook touts encryption as solution to security flaw.
