Recently, social networking sites were trying to assure their users that their privacy is important to them. But it looks like that their attempts have been in vain as on Thursday the Wall Street Journal revealed that some social networking sites share information of their users with advertisers. As a matter of fact, such information can lead to identifying individuals.
According to a report conducted by the Wall Street Journal, a range of social networking sites are probably sharing personal information of users with advertisers. As a result, MySpace as well as Facebook made changes in their privacy settings.
Unfortunately, providing personal information to advertisers is regarded as common practice that happen across the web. Moreover, in most cases it is impossible to track who managed to send information to advertisers. As a result, advertisers are able to see almost all information from a hometown to real names.
The actual problem is that social networking sites are able to obscure profile ID numbers as well as user names from advertisers but, in fact, they do not do that. Actually, Facebook was a serious offender as the company provided information on what profile was being viewed as well as who was making the viewing.
Other networking sites such as LiveJournal, MySpace, Digg, Xanga, as well as Twitter showed the user names as well as profiles that were visited when anyone clicked on the ad.
In fact, it looks ironical as all these companies are breaching their own conditions and terms, according to which they promise not to disclose personal data to any third parties.
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