Facebook Receives New York Subpoena Over Safety, Security
This article concerning mostly Facebook covers a recent development in security and privacy in the Facebook community. The New York Attorney General has subpoenaed documents related to Facebook's sercurity and privacy over complaints of sexual solicitations.
Facebook spokeswoman Brandee Barker said the company will work closely with all the state attorneys general to "maintain a trusted environment for Facebook users and to demonstrate the efficacy of these efforts."
"We strive to uphold our high standards for privacy on Facebook and are constantly working on processes and technologies that will further improve safety and user control on the site," she said.
After setting up fake accounts of young females, the NY Attorney General's office found that appropriate action from Facebook is slow if not non-existent. The subpoena also requires Facebook to submit their policies on user safety and claims made to consumers about the safety of the site.
Social network traffic up 11.5 percent; MySpace still dominates
A report from Hitwise, the US market share of internet traffic to social networking websites is on the rise (11.5% from last yea). Facebook is still the "Heavyweght" with 80% market share. Facebook has only 10%. While it may seem that MySpace has no chance of losing its crown, don't forget Friendster a social site that was very dominate before MySpace came out. The market can change very rapidly over a quick period of time.
These two articles show the comparison between user growth and the activity of theUS legal system. In the WSJ article we can see the American legal system in action as they gain traction in the grey-shaded area of information security law. MySpace has been in the spotlight because of online predator cases and been the main focus in the media. Now that other social networking sites has grown, such as Facebook (doubled in users in the past year), they are coming closer scrutiny.
It is certain that the law and social network policy will surely meet many times in the future. The spike in user growth of these sites only increases the amount of attention that they will receive.
Comments (1)
It's nice that there are so many different social networking sites similar to MySpace and Facebook, so people can usually find one that's their speed. Still, if you want to be connected to as many people as possible, you need to join one of the bigger ones, so the large varity of sites is only so useful. The whole security thing changes matters though, since bigger sites tend to have more creepy people/stalkers/sexual preditors.
More competition would probably be a good thing though. It might up some of those security standards. Maybe in the future we'll be able to friend blogs across the different blogging sites in order to have a bigger network and actually allow for some competition. That'd be really spectacular though, since there's about 0 incentive for blogging sites to make that option available.
Posted by Abby Assetto | October 7, 2007 3:31 PM
Posted on October 7, 2007 15:31