Although it was finished on February, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada released last 25th September a research paper that examines the privacy protections available on social networks popular with Canadians (Facebook, Linkedin, Livejournal, MySpace, Hi5 and Skyrock). There we can find a lot of useful information about their privacy ‘faults’. The study aims to provide users with a general indication of the protection each network provides, and gives a large list of recomendations to SNS providers to improve their privacy policies.
As an example of its content, very interesting observations about advertising are done:
Although the privacy policies of each of the sites acknowledged that information would be used in some way for advertising, none of them provided a clear statement of what information would be used, nor of how it would be shared. Sites were more likely to state that they would not share particular items of personally identifiable information (name, email, etc) than to list what information could or would be shared.
It’s clear that users don’t control what data are disclosed to advertising third parties, and don’t know who are they because some SNS don’t identify them. As recomendation, sites should be encouraged to be clearer about what information is or may be used by advertising purposes.
The report first makes a complete analysis of each of the SNS, and finally compares them trough different areas: registration information, real identities vs pseudonyms, privacy controls, photo tagging… I strongly recommend a deep reading to those who aim to understand SNS privacy implications.
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