Social Networks luring us.

The phenomenon of social networking has become a part of our everyday lives. Being addicted to Facebook myself, I forgot what I used to do when social networking wasn’t around.
Knowing the pros and not the cons social network users constantly release information and material not knowing who is tracing it or where this goes back to.

As we discussed in tutorials many major social networking sites are leaking information that allows third party advertising and tracking companies to associate the web browsing habits of users with a specific person, researchers warn.

Not knowing any of this prior to our tutorial as I had a recent break up changing from “in a relationship” to “single” I had noticed for the past two weeks all my adverts were related to Internet dating sites. ‘Plenty of Fish’ stood out as there were many more dating site ads appearing on the side of the screen. As I was feeling a bit depressed, at the same time was laughing due to the rapid response of ads.

Craig Wills of Worcester Polytechnic explains that "In some cases, the leakage may be

unintentional, but in others, there is clever and surreptitious anti-privacy engineering at work," Through the survey of the 12 biggest social networks they discovered that 11 of them were leaking personal identity information to third-parties including data aggregators, which track and aggregate user viewing habits for targeted ad-serving purposes.

I figured that anything for “free” has a twist; in this case of social networking sites it is the motives and intentions in stealing your information in return providing a “free” service of a virtual world. Whatever the matter or purpose of the providers are they have succeeded in hooking me and many others in using their networks as I now enjoy the funny ad’s that pop up in the side of the window.

Michael