Social Networks Leak Your Information

A study out this week from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) shows that mobile social networks are giving data about users' physical locations to tracking sites and other social networking services.

Researchers reported that all 20 sites that were studied leaked some kind of private information to third-party tracking sites. "This initial look at mobile online social networks raises some serious concerns, but there is more work to be done," said Craig Wills, professor of computer science at WPI and co-author of the study. "The fact that third-party sites now seem to have the capacity to build a comprehensive and dynamic portrait of mobile online social network users argues for a comprehensive way to capture the entire gamut of privacy controls into a single, unified, simple, easy-to-understand framework, so that users can make informed choices about their online privacy and feel confident that they are sharing their personal, private information only with those they choose to share it with." In the study, the researchers looked at the practices of 13 mobile online social networks, including Brightkite, Flickr, Foursquare, Gowalla and Urbanspoon. They also studied seven traditional online social networks, such as Facebook , LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter , which allow users to access their sites using mobile devices.