NY Blasts Facebook Over Predators
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The attorney general of New York charges that Facebook's safety controls and procedures are deficient and fail to properly protect minors.
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Obama no better than online privacy One million Facebook users have made a mockery of American politics.â¦
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New York state's attorney general and legislative leaders introduce legislation to protect people online.
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Facebook is suing seventeen people and a Canadian Internet porn company for allegedly trying to mine the popular social networking site for its users&#39; personal details.Facebook alleges that in June servers controlled by the defendants used automated scripts to make more than 200,000 requests for personal information stored on Facebook&#39;s site. The allegations are contained in an amended lawsuit filed earlier this month in U.S. District Court in San Jose, California.The company first filed suit back in June, but amended the complaint this month after obtaining court orders to identify who controlled the servers trying to access its site.Experts have warned people against publishing too much personal information on social networking sites for fear it could be collected and then abused by fraudsters.Facebook, one of the most-used social networking sites after MySpace, said the automated scripts caused error messages to be generated, but the company did not say if user information was successfully collected.Named in the suit is Istra Holdings, which controls SlickCash.com, an affiliate advertising business that offers commissions to Web publishers for referring Internet surfers to its portfolio of adult sites.It also names Brian Fabian and Josh Raskin, both of whom the suit says work at Istra in Toronto, and Ming Wu of Markham, Ontario, as well as 14 other unidentified people.Facebook said the hacking attempts cost it at least US$5,000 to investigate. The company has requested a jury trial and is seeking to bar the defendants from accessing its computer systems in the future, in addition to damages.&#160;
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Facebook responded this week to user complaints that it's virtually impossible to delete an account from the social-networking Web site.
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Lawyers raise eyebrows after hacked e-mails reveal that New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo was planning to outsource evidence-gathering on peer-to-peer child pornographers to MediaDefender, a company in the business of deceiving file-sharing sites.
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New York lawmakers proposed legislation on Tuesday that would provide new protection from convicted sex offenders hanging out on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.
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Critics are ridiculing the latest legislative effort to combat online sexual predators, saying provisions of a law would be easy to circumvent and amounted to little more than political "window dressing" supported by the online social networking giant MySpace.com.
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Facebook kicked off the new year with additional tweaks to its development platform as it continues to&#160;grapple with external programmers&#160;who spur adoption of their applications among Facebook members through deceitful and abusive practices.Facebook has been battling this problem since May, when it opened its social-networking site to third-party developers interested in building applications for it.Chief among the annoyances have been self-promotion features in applications such as bulk unsolicited e-mails and intrusive message displays. Although&#160;Facebook has made several changes&#160;in past months, the problems persist.On Jan. 1, a Facebook official made an official blog posting titled &quot;New Year. New Rules&quot; in which he states that some developers have been sneakily bypassing the amount of e-mail notifications applications are allowed to send.&quot;Specifically, these developers have been sending notification e-mails to users for one application with another application, in order to &#39;pool&#39; the total quota of e-mail notifications together,&quot; wrote Dave Morin, Facebook&#39;s senior platform manager.In addition, other applications have been designed to trick Facebook members into inadvertently installing other applications by placing links into e-mail messages, internal notifications and the Mini-Feed feature in member profiles.&quot;Starting today, we&#39;ll begin blocking links in Mini-Feed, Notifications, and Notification E-mails which lead to the installation of another application in the hopes that developers focus on user experience and engagement being paramount, not deceiving users for the sake of growth,&quot; Morin wrote.&#160;
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New York&#39;s attorney general and state legislative leaders presented a bill on Tuesday aimed at protecting people from sexual predators on the Internet, aand Facebook, MySpace, and Yahoo backed the effort.In a press conference, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, Senate Majority Leader Joseph L. Bruno, and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver announced legislation they called &quot;groundbreaking&quot; in its proposed restrictions and controls of sexual offenders&#39; online activities.&quot;Today I believe we&#39;re proposing the most comprehensive, smartest, toughest law in the nation to keep people safe online, especially minors,&quot; Cuomo said.The Electronic Security and Targeting of Online Predators Act (e-STOP) responds to the widely documented use that sexual offenders make of the Internet, in particular social-networking sites, to stalk and victimize people, particularly minors.Specifically, e-STOP would require convicted sex offenders to register their e-mail addresses, instant message screen names, and any other online identifiers with the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services. That data would then be made available to social-networking companies and other online services so that they can then block access to sexual offenders and remove them from their sites.The bill also calls for allowing sentencing courts and the state&#39;s Parole Board to restrict the online activities of sex offenders who used the Internet to commit their crimes, victimized a minor, or are considered highly likely to repeat their offenses. In particular, the bill would ban many sex offenders from using social-networking sites.There are more than 627,000 registered sex offenders in the U.S., about 25,000 of whom are in New York, according to Cuomo&#39;s office.State attorneys general have been very vocal about their concerns over online safety, in particular of minors who are preyed upon by sexual offenders on social-networking sites, which are widely used by teens.The attorneys general have often criticized Facebook, MySpace, and other sites for, in their view, not doing enough to protect minors, but the two sides have recently seemed to get on better terms and have rolled out several joint security initiatives, partnerships and agreements.The e-STOP bill is needed to help social-networking companies keep their sites safer and will complement these companies&#39; in-house security efforts, Cuomo said.MySpace Chief Security Officer Hemanshu Nigam agreed and said laws need to keep up with the times and technology. &quot;We hope [e-STOP] becomes a model for other states to follow,&quot; Nigam said.&quot;As Facebook and other Internet companies do our best to exclude [from our sites] those who would do our users harm, we need help from the government,&quot; said Chris Kelly, Facebook&#39;s chief privacy officer.Ideally, legislation like e-STOP would get enacted widely in U.S. states and also at the federal level, Cuomo said.
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By ANICK JESDANUN  NEW YORK - Users of the online hangout Facebook revolted and won as the site agreed Friday to let them turn off a new feature that drew privacy complaints because it lets others easily see changes made to their personal profile pages.
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Internet law professor Michael Geist says the walled gardens of social networks should be pulled down.
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Stalks you, sir The introduction of new features on social network site Facebook has sparked a backlash from users. Design changes to the site violate user privacy and ought to be scrapped, according to disgruntled users who have launched a series of impromptu protests. One protest site is calling for users to boycott Facebook on 13 September in opposition against a feature called News Feed, which critics argue is a Godsend for stalkers.â¦
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A Los Angeles Times report claims that federal authorities are looking for cooperation from the News Corp.-owned social-networking site surrounding the cyberbullying-related death of a 13-year-old girl in 2006.
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Changes in the way Facebook users are notified of developments in their friends' lives cause an unprecedented backlash on the social networking site -- and force users to reevaluate the nature of social networking communities. By Michael Calore.
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Attorney General Bob McDonnell wants sex offenders to register their e-mail accounts and online identities. While this gesture might score McDonnell political points for appearing tough on predators, it will do little to protect children.
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The owners of a rival social networking Web site are trying to shut down Facebook.com, charging in a federal lawsuit that Facebook's founder stole their ideas while they were students at Harvard.