Schumer calls on FTC to tackle social-net privacy

A press release from Schumer's office announced that he has written to the FTC to ask that the agency "examine the privacy disclosures of social-networking sites to ensure they are not misleading or fail to fully disclose the extent to which they share information...(and) provide guidelines for use of private information and prohibit access without user permission."

This was prompted by the new products and services unveiled by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the social network's annual developer conference, which took place in San Francisco last week. The big showcase at F8 was the "Open Graph," which aims to forge firmer channels of communication between multiple social-networking sites. In conjunction, Facebook rolled out something called "Instant Personalization," which lets users easily share the bulk of their personal profile information with third-party companies.

According to Schumer, frequent changes to social-networking privacy policies can be extremely confusing for users, and that the FTC currently does not regulate this at all.

For more on this story, read Senator calls on FTC to tackle social-net privacy on CNET News.