It seems that Facebook is becoming increasingly more shady everyday that goes by. With rumors of lies about the amount of users in the Oslo, Norway area to appeal to advertisers and now the recent privacy scandals.
Some of Facebook's most popular applications such as Farmville have been found to be transmitting user ID's to advertisers and companies that track what people do online. The staggering amount of users on Facebook (according to Facebook) is now reaching over 500 million. This puts a lot of people at risk of the current security breach. While many including the government feel it is something to be investigated others are simply looking over it without being surprised at all.
Two Privacy Caucus co-chairs, U.S. Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., and Joe Barton, R-Texas, sent Mark Zuckerberg a personal letter touching on the current issue.
"Given the number of current users, the rate at which that number grows worldwide, and the age range of Facebook users, combined with the amount and the nature of information these users place in Facebook's trust, this series of breaches of consumer privacy is a cause for concern."
One would assume that the simple fact that the government decided to put its foot down and get involved means that it must be an issue of quite concern. Well, not everyone feels that way, Mike Arrington of Techcrunch.com thinks people are overreacting.
"If you do stuff online, people are tracking it and putting it into a database and trying to sell you stuff based on that. There's not much you can do about it except not be online. And it's not all that bad, really, to get ads for diapers when you're having a baby, or ads for cars when you are looking to buy a car. Life will go on."
Arrington may not be taking the situation serious enough. Most of us know that our IP's are tracked and information can be transferred in ways we are unaware of. However, Facebook is used and trusted by so many of us and this was the last place something like this should happen. Twitter ought to take this one and run with it.
Written by: Rob Schanz
