By EMILY STEEL And JESSICA E. VASCELLARO
Facebook,
MySpace and several other social-networking sites have been sending
data to advertising companies that could be used to find consumers'
names and other personal details, despite promises they don't share such
information without consent.
The
practice, which most of the companies defended, sends user names or ID
numbers tied to personal profiles being viewed when users click on ads.
After questions were raised by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook and
MySpace moved to make changes. By Thursday morning Facebook had
rewritten some of the offending computer code.
Advertising companies are receiving
information that could be used to look up individual profiles, which,
depending on the site and the information a user has made public,
include such things as a person's real name, age, hometown and
occupation.
Facebook and several other social-networking
sites have been sending data to advertisers that could be used to find
consumers' names and other personal details. Emily Steel, Julia Angwin
and Kara Swisher discuss.
Several large advertising companies identified by the Journal as receiving the data, including Google Inc.'s DoubleClick and Yahoo
Inc.'s Right Media, said they were unaware of the data being sent to
them from the social-networking sites, and said they haven't made use of
it.
Across the Web, it's common for advertisers to receive the address of
the page from which a user clicked on an ad. Usually, they receive
nothing more about the user than an unintelligible string of letters and
numbers that can't be traced back to an individual. With social
networking sites, however, those addresses typically include user names
that could direct advertisers back to a profile page full of personal
information. In some cases, user names are people's real names.
Most social networks haven't bothered to obscure user names or ID
numbers from their Web addresses, said Craig Wills, a professor of
computer science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, who has studied the
issue.
The sites may have been breaching their own privacy policies as well
as industry standards, which say sites shouldn't share and advertisers
shouldn't collect personally identifiable information without users'
permission. Those policies have been put forward by advertising and
Internet companies in arguments against the need for government
regulation.
Facebook, MySpace and several other
social-networking sites gave advertising companies information that
could be used to look up individual profiles, which, depending on the
site and the information a user has made public, include such things as a
person's real name, age, hometown and occupation.
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