Between the Lines

Larry Dignan, Andrew Nusca and Rachel King

As Facebook users keep sharing, partners see traffic grow and privacy advocates keep waving red flags

By | May 11, 2010, 1:28pm PDT

Summary: Despite warnings about privacy, Facebook users continue to share details about themselves across the social network.

Despite Jason Perlow’s ramblings, the Facebook momentum continues to grow. People are clicking “Like” all across the Web and sharing more than ever about themselves on the social networking site, just as Facebook and its partners had hoped.

In a post on its developer’s blog today, Facebook said that more than 100,000 sites have already integrated social plug-ins and that early results prove that people want to “interact and share and see what their friends recommend.” Some of the early results:

  • News sites are seeing significant increases in daily referral traffic with the Washington Post reporting a 290 percent jump and ABC News up by 250 percent. The Globe and Mail in Canada reported an 80 percent jump in referral traffic and said that people who have liked its Facebook page are commenting, sharing and reading more.
  • IMDb.com has seen daily referral traffic from Facebook double.
  • NHL.com has seen an 80 percent increase as people interact with articles, scores and videos.
  • Publishing site Scribd has seen referral traffic double.

No where in the post - obviously - was there any mention about the privacy concerns that have been raised recently. What’s really telling about that is that Facebook doesn’t really have a need to talk about those concerns. Facebook users clearly are not overly concerned with privacy and continue to share share share anything and everything they can.

Perlow has done his part to educate readers. Social networking expert Jennifer Leggio has chimed in about taking a new approach to Facebook to regain control over who sees what. And I’ve chimed in about the privacy and communications blunders at Facebook. Even privacy groups and government leaders are waving red flags.

And yet…

We’ve done what we’ve can to educate and inform. Beyond that, it’s hard to feel bad for those who will inevitably cry foul over privacy breeches later but didn’t take the time to think about what they were sharing on Facebook that might lead to such a breech.

Live and learn, I suppose.

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Sam has been a technology and business blogger for more than 18 years.

Disclosure

Sam Diaz

Sam Diaz has nothing to disclose.

Biography

Sam Diaz

Sam has been a technology and business blogger, reporter and editor at ZDNet, the Washington Post, San Jose Mercury News and Fresno Bee for more than 18 years. He's a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and a graduate of California State University, Fresno.

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good idea about facebook
gavin.chan 2nd Oct
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I don't want to name
Rama.NET 11th May 2010
but one of the bloggers here has no experiece to secure his system or at least his fanboism blinded him to do so. So I don't believe his ramblings. Period. Saying that, I don't trust anyone online.
--Ram--
1 - its privacy breach, not breech. Unless you are worried about pants.

2 - Perlow went to extremes, and danced around the subject. First it was his use of windows and the never found bug or malware that caused his FB account to be messed up. Yet he also complained that he had too many friends but admitted that he would friend basically anyone that reached out.

3 - most people use FB as entertainment. Kept as such, the privacy issues shouldnt affect that much. I dont put anything out there that i am not comfortable with anyone seeing. Once you let something leave your own computer and go to a 'cloud' no matter who owns it, you lose privacy with it.
@tiderulz
1. I definitely don't want breaches in my breaches.

2. Yet his actions were exactly like so many (most?) Facebook users.

3. Have you seen what many people put up on their Facebook pages? The privacy issue is HUGE! You're right about what happens once something is posted on the internet, but Facebook is aggressively moving to make the situation worse than it already is.
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Like this
zclayton2 Updated - 12th May 2010
.
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Like this
zclayton2 12th May 2010
WGARA? I would really like to to see a "F* This" to click on sites even more than a like button.
0 Votes
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Let it be...
fjpoblam 12th May 2010
No news: the privacy argument will be settled by results. I quit FB gladly. Good luck to the Zuckster! Just like that.
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good idea about facebook
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good idea about facebook
gavin.chan 2nd Oct
A good post. Do you know tattoo? It is quite amazing. We supply kinds of tattoo kits, tattoo machines, tattoo needles, tattoo ink and so on. Please buy tattoo kits for beginners at wholesale price from us.0XmgY

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