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Most divorces require spouses to part with some of their property, but in Connecticut, a soon-to-be ex-husband and wife are being asked to give up more than just investments, cars, TVs, kids, and pets. They have to hand over their social networking passwords. At the end of September, Judge Kenneth Shluger ordered that the attorneys for Stephen and Courtney Gallion exchange “their client’s Facebook and dating website passwords.”
Facebook has admitted that it constantly tracks its 750 million users even after they log out.
Technology bloggers have discovered that the social networking site monitors the other webpages the users visit, reported The Daily Mail.
Engineering director of Facebook, Mr Arturo Bejar, admitted that users continue to be tracked after they log out, but was quick to point out that the data was deleted right away.
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The data that is sent back to Facebook's servers include the IP address, or unique identifier of your computer, and a log of what you have been viewing.
These information help Facebook make billions of dollars each year from advertising, as such information is highly valuable.
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The tracking practices were exposed by Australian technology blogger Nik Cubrilovic, who found that when a user signs up to Facebook, monitoring files known as "cookies" get stored on the user's computer.
Mr Cubrilovic wrote: "Even if you are logged out, Facebook still knows and can track every page you visit. The only solution is to delete every Facebook cookie in your browser, or to use a separate (web) browser for Facebook interactions."
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Google Facebook and Twitter now all have similar products. But Twitter CEO Dick Costolo (somewhat inadvertently) made it clear yesterday that while all three have social networking features and make money from ads, they are in fundamentally different businesses.
At a very basic level, Google+ and Facebook are in the identity delivery business, and Twitter is in the information delivery business. That's a powerful distinction. It reflects a fundamentally different conception of what's more valuable: information or identity. It also gets at who is more valuable, advertisers or users.
On September 14, Al Gore will launch the Climate Reality Project, or “24 Hours of Reality” — this most recent project will have 24 presentations, done by 24 presenters in 13 languages, each broadcast one hour after the other, representing all the time zones of the world. Al Gore will be connecting the dots of climate change, extreme weather and pollution, among other things — but the innovative thing is that he wants to harness the power of his follower’s social media accounts in order to reach more people.
Gore is asking his supporters to lend him their accounts — the Project will be posting status updates in their name, trying to reach many more people as well as start a dialogue on the subject.
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But are there problems with this plan? Will harnessing social media seem like advertising, or does Gore have nothing to sell? Is there a reason to be worried about surrendering your online life to another person, or a corporation? Does one need to full-heartedly agree with the message before they choose to donate their account? Or is there simply nothing to worry about, and all that will be accomplished is a healthy, informative session on what could be the biggest problem humanity has ever faced?
By law, neither Facebook nor the government is obliged to inform a user when an account is subject to a search by law enforcement, though prosecutors are required to disclose material evidence to a defendant.
Twitter and several other social-media sites have formally adopted a policy to notify users when law enforcement asks to search their profile.
Last January, Twitter successfully challenged a gag order imposed by a federal judge that forbade them from informing users that the government had demanded their data.
Twitter said in an email message that its policy was "to help users protect their rights." The Facebook spokesperson would not say whether the company had a similar policy to notify users or if it was considering adopting one. REUTERS
Facebook Friend Exporter is a Chrome extension developed by Mohamed Mansour, an open source software engineer, that lets you grab all the information about your Facebook friends so you can import them elsewhere. Because it got popular recently, Facebook noticed and began to block the extension.
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Facebook Friend Exporter wasn’t designed with Google+ in mind (version 1 was in fact released in November 2010), but it has exploded in the past week as Google+ beta users look for ways to port over all their Facebook friends to Google+. Facebook clearly noticed a spike in usage (the extension now has more than 17,000 users), and decided to block it.
Mansour says that Facebook removed emails from their mobile site, which were critical to the original design of his extension. He told me that the company had implemented a throttling mechanism: if you visit any friend page five times in a short period of time, the email field is removed.
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“Facebook is actually hiding data (email) from you to see when your friends explicitly shared that to you,” Mansour told me in an e-mail. “Making it really hard to scrape because the only missing data is your emails, and that is your friends identity. Nothing else is.”
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Pew Internet & American Life project have some good news for American Facebook users (that might be you!): you have more close real friends, and are less "isolated." I totally relate! Right guys? Guys?
The study found that "The average user of a social networking site has more close ties and is half as likely to be socially isolated as the average American" (YES!) What's that mean? "Internet users average 14% more discussion confidants than non-users." Confidants! That's an exotic term for people you talk about having sex with.
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The average FB user is only Facebook-friends with 48% of the people they know, and 11% of users are friends with more people than they personally know. If anything, that seems extremely low, as friending people you glance at from across the bar becomes increasingly acceptable.
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"The average Facebook user's friends list consists of 56 people from high school; 22% of their total friends list," the study found. A plurality of people you can slowly watch grow old, fat, and increasingly irrelevant in your day to day life.
According to Inside Facebook’s data service, Facebook lost 6 million users in the U.S. last month, dropping from 155.2 million to 149.4 million. That’s the first time U.S. numbers have dropped in more than a year.
It also lost 1.52 million users in Canada, dropping to 16.6 million — that’s an 8% drop — and 100,000 each in the U.K., Norway, and Russia.
Calling that the end is near for Facebook is very premature at this point. Let’s first consider that even with these drops somewhere around half of the entire populations of the US and Canada has a Facebook account. That’s still impressive.
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A more important metric for Facebook is the same one that advertisers need to be looking at before they consider the social network for marketing efforts. How many of those accounts are active and real? It’s less of an issue for Facebook than it is for Twitter but all of the talk of total number of accounts in a social network is starting to sound like TV’s old mantra of how many households they reach. It’s an empty number that anyone who is doing even a little thinking will see as hype and not truly important.
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there were suggestions of doom for Facebook and the concern that growth had stopped unless they get into China
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French broadcasters who want to encourage viewer interaction via Facebook or Twitter accounts can no longer do so. The “follow us on Twitter” or “Like us on Facebook” refrains — common parlance in American broadcasting — are no longer allowed on French channels. The networks can still say “find us on social networks,” but services cannot be mentioned by name.
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The regulatory decree was issued on May 27. The rationale behind the decision? Apparently mentioning social networks like Twitter or Facebook by name goes against a 1992 decree prohibiting surreptitious advertising. Encouraging users to engage with the content creators or give their own feedback is “clandestine advertising” for the social networks themselves.
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Christine Kelly, a spokesperson for the CSA, tried to explain the decision by saying it “would be a distortion of competition” to “give preference to Facebook, which is worth billions of dollars, when there are many other social networks that are struggling for recognition.”
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The study’s authors argue that removing age restrictions from sites like Facebook might actually be the best way of improving child safety online.
Elisabeth Staksrud, from the University of Oslo and one of the report’s authors comments that: “since children often lie about their age to join ‘forbidden’ sites it would be more practical to identify younger users and to target them with protective measures.”
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The study, titled Social Networking, Age and Privacy, looked at trends among 25,000 young people across Europe. Researchers noted that European children are taking undue risks online:
A quarter of 9-16 year-olds on social networking sites across Europe have their profile set to ‘public’. One fifth of children whose profile is public display their address and/or phone number, twice as many as for those with private profiles. However, children in the U.K. tended to be more careful – only 10 per cent have their profiles set to ‘public.’
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Women who post loads of photos of themselves on their sites are conveying some strong personal characteristics, according to new research. These women are more likely to base their self-worth on appearance and use social networking to compete for attention.
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Streaming social media have an immediacy that is very different from, say, a conversation over lunch recounting the events of the previous weekend. When you see that your friends are sharing a bottle of wine without you — and at that very moment — “you can imagine how things could be different,” Professor Ariely said.
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It’s like a near miss in real life. “When would you be more upset?” he asked. “After missing your flight by two minutes or two hours?
“Two minutes, of course,” he said. “You can imagine how things could have been different, and that really motivates us to behave in strange ways.”
Fear of missing out does not apply only to those with a hyperactive nightlife.
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For Facebook, it almost certainly has to if it hopes to build a sustainable long-term business. It's biggest hope is that all of the data it collects will help it help advertisers connect with consumers in a much more targeted fashion than ever before possible.
When it comes to targeting, we're not just talking about demographic and interest information here. What if Facebook could deliver real-time ads based on the conversations its users are having when they're having them? According to AdAge, it is experimenting with precisely that.
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If Facebook can manage to connect consumers with businesses in real-time at the right time using data mining, the exorbitant valuations given in secondary markets might not be so crazy.
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Are kids slipping through the cracks in Facebook's just-ask age screening approach?
The social networking site kicks off around 20,000 underage users per day, its chief privacy adviser, Mozelle Thompson, told Australia's parliament this week.
He admitted that the site's way of weeding out those who don't meet the 13-and-up age requirement -- essentially a user-entry honor system -- is "not perfect," because there's no mechanism for detecting kids who simply enter a false age.
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A recent Pew study found that nearly half of all U.S. 12-year-olds use social networking sites -- and privacy concerns in regard to Facebook's younger members have been growing of late. This month, Sen. Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat, wrote to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (pictured) to argue for reforms in the site's privacy measures. "Under Facebook's policy, 13 million users under the age of 18 may be allowed to share their personal information just like adult users," Franken wrote. "These younger users are the most vulnerable to predators on Facebook and the rest of the Internet and it should be impossible for them to inadvertently share their phone numbers and home addresses with anyone."
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But Franken's figures don't factor in the unknown number of Facebook users under 13.
Other sites that are popular with kids handle the issue in differing ways. MySpace also requires users to be at least 13, but like Facebook, it has no practical way to verify that information. Disney.com allows children 12 and under to surf the site, and collects some personal information from them before they're eligible to participate in competitions, for example. Yahoo! doesn't allow kids 12 and under to register without the consent of a parent. Like Disney, it collects some limited idenifying information for participation in competitions and similar interactive features.
At SXSW 2011, I moderated a panel titled “Measuring Social Media – Let’s Get Serious,” with the goal of having a frank discussion about the realities, pratfalls and opportunities for individuals and marketers tasked with managing social media and measuring social media ROI.
During the Q&A session of the panel, a audience member from Porter Novelli asked Kevin Weil, product lead for revenue at Twitter, a pointed and direct question that cuts to the core of the conversation surrounding social media measurements: Who has access to the data?
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In the case of Twitter, the company offers free access to its API for developers. The API can provide access and insight into information about tweets, replies and keyword searches, but as developers who work with Twitter — or any large scale social network — know, that data isn’t always 100% reliable. Unreliable data is a problem when talking about measurements and analytics, where the data is helping to influence decisions related to social media marketing strategies and allocations of resources.
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The question that the audience member asked — and one that we tried to touch on a bit in the panel itself — was who has access to this raw data. Twitter doesn’t comment on who has full access to its firehose, but to Weil’s credit he was at least forthcoming with some of the names, including stalwarts like Microsoft, Google and Yahoo — plus a number of smaller companies.
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Cyber-utopians who believe the Arab spring has been driven by social networks ignore the real-world activism underpinning them
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Precisely how we communicate in these moments of historic crisis and transformation is important. The medium that carries the message shapes and defines as well as the message itself. The instantaneous nature of how social media communicate self-broadcast ideas, unlimited by publication deadlines and broadcast news slots, explains in part the speed at which these revolutions have unravelled, their almost viral spread across a region. It explains, too, the often loose and non-hierarchical organisation of the protest movements unconsciously modelled on the networks of the web.
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Speaking recently to the Huffington Post, Rosen argued that those taking positions at either extreme of the debate were being lazy and inaccurate. "Wildly overdrawn claims about social media, often made with weaselly question marks (like: 'Tunisia's Twitter revolution?') and the derisive debunking that follows from those claims ('It's not that simple!') only appear to be opposite perspectives. In fact, they are two modes in which the same weightless discourse is conducted.
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Blogs were once the outlet of choice for people who wanted to express themselves online. But with the rise of sites like Facebook and Twitter, they are losing their allure for many people — particularly the younger generation.
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Facebook is threatening legal action against the Daily Mail amid a dispute over the headline of a front page story that named the social networking website in the context of a story about a paedophile gang operating in Devon.
Friday's Mail splashed with the headline "How many more victims of Facebook sex gang?", after parents of 16,000 pupils in Torbay were warned of an ongoing "complex child abuse investigation" that may involve 20 or more victims in the area.
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