Social Networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are in the line of fire. US Senate Jay Rockefeller, the Commerce Committee Chairman has issued a statement demanding for information in context to infringement of privacy laws.
On this note he hopes to address the outflow of personal user information from these sites to third party entities by putting forth a new legislation which secures user privacy. Executives at Facebook Inc. and MySpace Inc. are sporting furrowed brows as the Senate continues to bombard them with questions pertaining to the indicated breach in privacy.
Speaking of the same he quoted, “I intend to find out whether today’s social-networking sites are adequately protecting their users’ personal information. I fully intend to conduct oversight and formulate strong public policy that protects the privacy of American consumers.”
The executives at Facebook on their part claim to have incorporated measures to curb and block the flow of personal information to sources like unverified companies and advertisers. The website faces utmost pressure to put to action these reservations while juggling between serving its 500 million active users and attaining its share of revenue from advertisers.
When a user chooses to use applications or play games, he enters a spot of vulnerability in terms of his personal data. According to Rockefeller’s message to Facebook founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, the violation of the company’s privacy policy can be traced around more than 10 million users.
The questions asked were regarding the ones affected, the company’s privacy policy enforcement, the penalties imposed against violations and the steps partaken to avoid them.
In response to this, Facebook’s spokesperson Andrew Noyes commented, “The issue is caused by an inherent weakness in Web browsers, which automatically share information with visited websites.” He also assured that henceforth Facebook will encrypt user IDs and resolve the issue with Internet browsers. MySpace is yet reviewing the letter and is expected to dispatch a reply any time now.
0 comments:
Post a Comment