The Pot Calls The Kettle Black

Google Warns of Privacy Issues on the Social Web

"In a recent paper about social privacy Google researchers caution that the expansion of the social Web and our growing involvement with it is compromising our privacy while offering the false sense of security that we act in the privacy of our own social circle.

"Specifically, the paper suggests three areas where the social Web compromises user privacy.

"1. Lack of control over activity streams

"According to the paper, there are two primary ways in which lack of control over activity streams may compromise our privacy; the lack of control we have over events going into our activity streams (examples given are Facebook Beacon and coComment), and the lack of control we have when it comes to who can see our activity stream as is possible with Google Reader.

"2. Unwelcome linkage

"The authors define unwelcome linkage as occurring when links on the Internet reveal information about you that you had not intended to reveal, for instance trackbacks and accidental linkage.

"3. De-anonymization through merging of social graphs

"Given social networking sites extract a fair amount of personally identifiable information; the authors suggest it may be possible to uncover personal information by comparing data across social networking sites."

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Full PDF of the Google research here.