Across the web, its common for advertisers like Google Inc.’s DoubleClick and Yahoo Inc.’s Right Media, to receive the address of the page from which a user clicked on an advertisement. They receive nothing more than an incomprehensible string of letters and numbers that can’t be used to retrieve users’ information.
However, with social networking sites, those addresses include data which advertisers can use to look up individual profiles and discover users’ personal information and interests, contrary to their privacy policy and their promises they don’t share such information without consent.
After Wall Street Journal’s questions, Facebook and MySpace moved to make changes to stop the handover.
“If you are looking at your profile page and you click on an advertisement, you are telling that advertiser who you are”, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School said.
See the graphic about Internet sites that share information that could be tied to individual profiles.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Tags: advertising, privacy, social networks
