It's NEVER to late to Delete (http://www.windows7newsinfo.com/smf/index.php/topic,9404.0.html) your Facebook Account click below for details.
▼ ▼ ▼ ▼
(http://i47.tinypic.com/2z3oq47.jpg) (http://www.windows7newsinfo.com/smf/index.php/topic,9404.0.html)
Facebook isn'’t a leak, It’s a Faucet
(http://i52.tinypic.com/2rx8gus.jpg)
Two hot topics collided on the Facebook recently when a new study revealed that site's ad-targeting program has the potential to out gay men to advertisers -- even users who have chosen to hide their sexual preference (the "interested in" portion of the profile) from other users.
"It's no secret that Facebook, like many other online services, targets ads to different groups of users based on demographic data," Gawker's Adrian Chen wrote (http://gawker.com/5669316/is-facebook-outing-gay-users-to-advertisers?skyline=true&s=i) in his post about the study. "But using a sensitive category like sexuality to target advertising -- which Facebook apparently does -- can lead to troubling privacy issues."
Researchers from Microsoft and Germany's Max Planck Institute (http://saikat.guha.cc/pub/imc10-ads.pdf) monitored six fake profiles of varying gender preference -- one gay man, one lesbian woman, two heterosexual women and two heterosexual men. While the ads for the heterosexual and lesbian women weren't so different, those of the gay and heterosexual men were.
For example, the gay male profile received ads for gay bars. The straight male profiles didn't.
The gay male profile also received gender-neutral ads, such as those for nursing schools. The straight male profiles never received nursing school ads, or similar gender-neutral ads received by the gay male profile.
The issue here isn't stereotyping professions, but what the advertiser learns about a man clicking on an ad only targeted toward gay males. As the study points out, it's this:
"The danger with such ads, unlike the gay bar ad where the target demographic is blatantly obvious, is that the user reading the ad text would have no idea that by clicking it he would reveal to the advertiser both his sexual-preference and a unique identifier (cookie, IP address, or e-mail address if he signs up on the advertiser's site). Furthermore, such deceptive ads are not uncommon; indeed exactly half of the 66 ads shown exclusively to gay men (more than 50 times) during our experiment did not mention 'gay' anywhere in the ad text."
Last year, MIT students developed a software program (http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/09/20/project_gaydar_an_mit_experiment_raises_new_questions_about_online_privacy/?page=1) able to detect with notable accuracy a Facebook user's sexuality via his or her friend's list. The term project for a class on ethics and law on the electronic frontier sparked discussion among privacy advocates about how much is inadvertently revealed about a social network user by both the user and the user's friends.
This new study on ad behavior tracking shows how much is revealed about a Facebook user even without that user's active participation.
Outing, or involuntary revelation of one's gay status, is still a sensitive and serious topic, as the current focus on suicides connected with gay bashing shows. Last week, Facebook made a very public display of deleting hate speech and imagery littering a page set up "in memory of the recent suicides due to gay abuse," and a promise to work with the The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD (http://www.glaad.org/)) and monitor such abuse in the future.
Facebook users possibly outed via advertisers is tenuously connected with its GLAAD partnership, but it's yet another potential public relations nightmare.
Behavior ad targeting happens on most all popular Internet haunts. Still, the study found that while Google uses location to showcase ads, Facebook takes into account user demographic, interests and sexual preference for ad placement.
In his Gawker post (http://gawker.com/5669316/is-facebook-outing-gay-users-to-advertisers?skyline=true&s=i), Chen also pointed to security researcher Christopher Soghoian's suggestions (http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2010/10/more-private-data-leakage-at-facebook.html) to Facebook to deal with this and other sensitive information advertisers access in user profile:
"1. Do not allow advertisers to target advertisements based on sensitive categories, such as religion, sexuality, or political affiliation.
"2. Disclose, directly below the ad, the fact that the ad was targeted based on a specific profile attribute, and state there which attribute that was. Users should also be told, after clicking on the ad, but before being directed to the site, that the advertiser may be able to learn this sensitive information about them, simply by visiting the site."
Facebook did not respond specifically to questions about the study or Soghoian's suggestions. A spokesperson issued this statement via e-mail:
"Our advertising guidelines prohibit advertisers from using user data collected from running an ad on Facebook, including information derived from targeting criteria. For example, we explicitly prohibit them from associating that targeting detail with the data collected from the user in forms they fill out, applications they make, or other interactions on their site. We also require that targeting of ads based on a user attribute be directly relevant to the offer in the advertisement. We take the privacy of our users very seriously and take action when violations of these policies come to our attention."
A GLAAD spokesperson agreed to review the report, but the organization has not yet commented on it.