September 16, 2009 by Daniel James

A recent report from Information Week highlighted a study by a professor of computer science and a researcher at AT&T entitled On the Leakage of Personally Identifiable Information Via Online Social Networks. The report highlights various ways that 12 of the largest social networks leak information about their users, such as current or recent locations, names, employers, phone numbers, and street addresses. Somewhere between 55 and 90% of social networkers leave their privacy settings in the default, leakage-permitting state.

While some of this information might seem innocuous, each piece of information serves to build an ever-increasing profile about each user. Combining information about a person's employers and recent locations, for example, could provide a fairly reliable schedule of a person's habits. An advertiser might use this information to serve more targeted ads, but a thief might use this to identify times of the day when the user is away from home.

Education about true privacy in social networking has never been more important. WeOurFamily makes no assumption that its users want to share their private information with anyone except whom they explicity choose. It's private from the very beginning, something that the other social networks haven't quite gotten down yet. Take control of your Personally Identifiable Information--get a WeOurFamily account.