The Guardian reports that the UK’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre today claimed its new Facebook application has prompted 211 new reports of suspicious online behaviour.

Facebook, which has 26 million UK monthly unique users, proposed the app after it refused to introduce Ceop’s reporting button to every profile on the site, and it has now been downloaded 55,000 times since it was launched on 12 July.

But online safety campaigners are concerned that the spat between Ceop and Facebook, and the preoccupation with the so-called “panic button”, is distracting the agency from more wide-ranging efforts to tackle online grooming and abuse.

A spokeswoman for Ceop said the agency is keen to move the debate on and emphasise its work in other areas, including discussing a browser plug-in with Microsoft, Mozilla and Google.

She added that the 211 reports through the Facebook app would all be classified as very serious offences, such as sexual grooming. Of Ceop’s cases for the 12 months up to February this year, 38% or 2,391 reports came through the ClickCeop button.

Alex Nagle, Ceop’s head of harm reduction, said there is no single solution to online safety. “The UK has adopted a holistic and multi-sector approach which combines education and awareness with a child-victim focus,” he added.

“Many of these were because young people had the ability to easily report directly – from the online environment they inhabit – those who are behaving inappropriately towards them. We cannot prevent all instances of harm to our children in the real or the virtual world, but because of the efforts of many stakeholders the UK is an inherently safer place for them to be online.”

Facebook’s European director of policy, Richard Allan, said the social networking website is looking at other ways to support online safety, including the “site integrity” project which aims to identify suspicious activity and fake profiles at its multilingual support centres.

“There is a lot more to explore in the use of social media platforms not only in the distribution of centralised safety messages,” he said. “We are keen to share expertise with Ceop, recognising their expertise with child safety issues, but also our huge expertise in managing websites and enabling users to seek help when they need it, and in developing a platform which people can use to share information and help each other.”

The home secretary, Theresa May, has proposed folding Ceop into a new National Crime Agency. Staff have since been concerned the move could mean job cuts and less power, while the government has been evaluating the performance of the agency.

Mark Williams Thomas, an independent expert in child safety, praised Ceop for raising the profile of online safety but raised fresh concerns about the priorities of the agency.

“Ceop has done an incredibly good job in online policing by raising awareness of grooming and predatory paedophiles online,” he said. “But this recent spat with Facebook about the report button has lost the focus on what really makes the internet safer for children. One of our biggest concerns is that parents have been put off using Facebook, which is actually one of the safest sites on the internet, and driven onto more dangerous sites.”

Williams-Thomas criticised the Ceop reporting system which, rather than being a panic button with an immediate response, is an 11-stage process that requires children to submit their full name, address and contact information and agree to be contacted by a policeman at their home.

“The idea of a reporting button is vital but the current button is inefficient and puts children off,” he said.

Analysis by another independent safety expert, who did not wish to be named, reinforced those concerns, saying children had needed to ask teachers to help them report problems. “This is not a problem where this type of relationship exists, but for an individual without the necessary support networks it could be a real issue,” this source said.

Access the original article online at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/aug/12/ceop-facebook-child-protection

The Telegraph reports that Facebook is preparing to allow its members to share their location with each other by launching ‘check-in’ tool, which would pit it against services like Foursquare, according to a report.

The new feature, which has been rumoured to have been in the pipeline for months, will make its debut “within weeks”.

Larry Yu, Facebook’s spokesman told the publication: “We are working on location features and product integrations, which we’ll be launching in the coming months, and we’ll share more details when appropriate.”

So far, Facebook has yet to launch any geo-location tools, despite it seeming a logical next step. However, when it does launch the new feature, it will present a major threat to location-based social networks, such as Foursquare and Gowalla, which are just beginning to take off and allow their users to share their location with friends by ‘checking-in’ at bars, restaurants, clubs and even offices and railway stations.

Foursquare, and services like it, are aware that they are running the risk of established digital players, namely Twitter and Facebook, starting to prioritise location and developing a whole host of tools to encourage their huge userbases and commercial partners to take advantage of geo opportunities.

However, Dennis Crowley, Foursquare’s co-founder, remained relaxed when presented with this potential spanner in the works, during an exclusive interview with The Telegraph, last month, saying: “Twitter already turned on its location capabilities – but regardless of others starting to play on location more, Foursquare remains unique as people are using it for different reasons. They are using it to play the game, discover offers, tell friends where they are and find new places.

“On Twitter, people are telling each other their thoughts, whereas on Foursquare we are building an incentive and reward program to encourage people to try new places.”

CNET’s ‘sources’ say that Facebook has also partnered with Localeze, the company which Twitter uses to allow its users attach a location to their tweets, when posting from a mobile device.

Speculation was rife that Facebook, as well as Yahoo! and Microsoft were all interested in buying Foursquare back in April. However, the site resisted a buy-out with a price tag of more than $100 million, in favour of a $20 million cash investment led the major Silicon Valley venture capital company, Andreessen Horowitz. The VC is headed up by high profile technology investors Marc Andreessen (co-founder of Ning, Twitter investor and Facebook board member) and Ben Horowitz (Fluther investor and a former HP vice president).

Yesterday Gowalla, Foursquare’s largest rival, up its ante, by finally opening up its API, allowing developers the ability to build spin-off services.

Access the original article online at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/7939532/Facebook-takes-on-Foursquare.html

The Telegraph reports that Facebook has pledged to develop new security measures to combat a growing surge in cyber bullying and abuse of strangers.

Engineers at Facebook are reportedly working on new systems to fight the trend of “trolling”, where anonymous online users “bombard” victims with offensive messages or abuse.

Reports have claimed a growing number of “tribute” pages had been targeted including those in memory of the Cumbria shootings victims and soldiers who died in Afghanistan.

In other extreme cases such abuse has led to some teenagers committing suicide. At present users can only manually delete abusive messages. But in efforts to combat the growing trend, Facebook officials said they were working on new systems that automatically delete abuse.

Administrators of such sites will also be given new advice on how to cope with “trolls” and be given access to the new tools.

It comes just weeks after the announcement that children using Facebook could now report bullying and suspicious behaviour directly to the authorities after the launch of a new application.

Officials figures from Ofcom show that children as young as eight were using Facebook despite age restrictions.

A Facebook spokesman said that while the company already employed “robust” systems, engineers were developing new programmes to combat the threat.

“Because ‘trolls’ tend to set up fake accounts, we employ robust systems to flag and block them based on name and anomalous site activity,” he said. “Users who send lots of messages to non-friends, for example, or whose friend requests are rejected at a high rate, are marked as suspect. We’ve built extensive grey lists that prevent users from signing up with names commonly associated with fake accounts.”

He added: “Through the reporting process our team is also able to identify additional accounts using the same IP address so it is possible in certain situations to proactively remove multiple fake accounts.

“There’s always room for improvement, which is why we have a team of security experts and site integrity engineers working on these systems and developing new ones.”

Access the original article online at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/7939721/Facebook-vows-new-security-measures-to-combat-alarming-trolling-abuse-trend.html

The Telegraph reports that Facebook’s growth in the UK has waned over the last six months, suggesting that the social network is nearing saturation point, according to new statistics.

Despite signing up its 500 millionth member last month, the average amount of time spent on Facebook by a Briton has decreased from 30 minutes in December 2009, to 27.36 minutes during June and July 2010.

The figures, collated by web-analytics firm Hitwise, show that Facebook is still the second most visited site in the UK, after Google, and that it accounts for one in every six web pages accessed in Britain. However, Robin Goad, Hitwise’s research director, believes that the figures show that Facebook is nearing saturation point in the UK.

“Facebook’s market share of UK page views has trebled over the last five years, but growth has slowed significantly over the last six months. Last month there was a slight decline in share, but this may well be down to seasonality – the August to September back-to-school/college/university period is significant for Facebook,” he explained.

Goad added: “Facebook has a very high average session time – almost half an hour – but this has also stabilised over the last six months after increasing rapidly during the site’s ascendancy,”

Around 25 million Britons, more than a third of the entire population, now have Facebook accounts. After the US, Britain has the second-largest membership of Facebook in the world, according to InsideFacebook, followed by Indonesia and Turkey.

Although the 18-25 age group is Britain’s largest, well over half of British users of the site are over 25 and 38.2 per cent are over 35.

Along with the United States, Britain also has a thriving number of older users with 7.36 per cent being over 55 – almost double the proportion in France and 12 times the level in Indonesia.

British users are also fairly evenly split according to gender, with women outnumbering men by just 2.2 per cent overall.

Women outnumber men in all the older age groups (above 35) while men outnumber women at ages 34 and below.

Access the original article online at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/7936738/Facebook-nears-saturation-point-in-UK.html

The Guardian’s technology correspondent, Jemima Kiss, has written an interesting article about internet safety…

“For a while, it seemed as if the ongoing debate about online safety, and all the expertise engaged with that, was obscured by simplified ‘panic button’ coverage in the spat between Facebook and Ceop, the Child Explotation and Online Protection centre.

In the meantime, the Family Online Safety Institute had been collaborating on something far more worthwhile – an international directory of online safety initiatives. Grid features profiles, an outline of projects and initiatives and details of research and legislation in 150 countires.

It has been an enormous undertaking, taking two years to develop and with eight specialists. Fosi raised around $200,000 in sponsorship from its members including MySpace. Corporations and government organisations will pay a subscription to access the site, which will summarise updates and major developments in quarterly reviews from an expert panel and guest contributors.

Consumer version planned

“We think it’s a hugely significant portal because 10-15% of this content has never been seen in English,” said Fosi’s European development director David Miles, who led the project. “There’s a cornucopia of stuff in Indonesia, for example, around ICT and education.

“If you look at the challenges for parents in South Korea, Venezuela or London, they are facing similar issues – cyberbullying, learning to be web confident and in the differences between parents and kids. What is different is how the parents respond, the way an Arab parents responds to a parent going onto Facebook for the first time compared to a parent in Asia.”

This professional edition is the first incarnation – a consumer version, as well as expansion to cover a total of 200 countries, is in the works. It should combine the best practice of all the online safety agencies worldwide, as well as what doesn’t work, and generally make online campaigns more informed, coherent and centralised.

But it will be a significant challenge to keep the directory updated, just as it will be a challenge to adapt online safety mechanisms to cope with the growth of video which, Fosi, says, will account for half of all online content within two to three years.

The problem with the panic button

As for that panic button episode, Fosi chief executive Stephen Balkam said it was largely a label invented by the press. “Ceop has done a good job raising awareness of the potential dangers on social networking sites,” he said. “The problem is that in cases like that of Ashleigh Hall, she never panicked at all. She never thought of herself as in imminent danger – she was actively cooperating and communicating with this guy and actually went off Facebook onto MSN Messenger, which does have a panic button.” For Ceop to put so much emphasis on the panic button – or what Ceop internally actually calls a ‘don’t panic button’ – as an essential solution was therefore rather disingenuous, he argues.

Using that button as a reporting tool is far from a one-button process, and it is also not an anonymous process as it requires the child to enter their name and address to make a report. That’s not the case for Childline and even 999.

Cyberbullying is 99% of the problem

Facebook handles 2m reports through its site every week, and 80% of those are false. But of those cases that are genuine, by far the biggest issues are cyberbullying, addiction, oversharing and ’sexting’ – when girls are bullied into sending photos of themselves to ‘boyfriends’. Balkam cites research by Ncmec, the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children in the US, which found that 1% of child victimisation cases involved the internet. “Those cases are shocking and disturbing and they make the nightly news, but therefore they seen a greater problem than they are.”

The future of online safety is also about far more than just Facebook, which bears the brunt of the publicity because it is the most visible site. But it does have the opportunity to set a standard.

“Ceop has done a good job in companies like Facebook,” said Balkam. “It has awakened the sense of responsibility inside companies not just to improve, but to to innovate more in areas to do with reporting abusive behaviour or abusive content. It’s not bad at all to force the entire industry to raise its level and raise the bar. It has also forced Facebook to communicate a bit more about what it is facing. No company in the world has ever attracted 500m users or two million complaints per week. It’s extraordinary.”

Balkam said he’d asked Facebook, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, if it had a philosopher on the staff because it is having to deal, at a very fast pace with what is good and what is abhorrent behaviour.

“Aristotle and Plato struggled with that – and the average age at Facebook is 28.”

Access the original article online at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/pda/2010/aug/09/fosi-grid-facebook-ceop

Tom Meltzer of The Guardian discusses the curse of growing up in the social networking generation…

The first time I joined Facebook, I had to quit again immediately. It was my first week of university. I was alone, along with thousands of other students, in a sea of club nights and quizzes and tedious conversations about other people’s A-levels. This was back when the site was exclusively for students. I had been told, in no uncertain terms, that joining was mandatory. Failure to do so was a form of social suicide worse even than refusing to drink alcohol. I had no choice. I signed up.

Users of Facebook will know the site has one immutable feature. You don’t have to post a profile picture, or share your likes and dislikes with the world, though both are encouraged. You can avoid the news feed, the apps, the tweet-like status updates. You don’t even have to choose a favourite quote. The one thing you cannot get away from is your friend count. It is how Facebook keeps score.

Five years ago, on probably the loneliest week of my life, my newly created Facebook page looked me square in the eye and announced: “You have 0 friends.” I closed the account.

Facebook is not a good place for a lonely person, and not just because of how precisely it quantifies your isolation. The news feed, the default point of entry to the site, is a constantly updated stream of your every friend’s every activity, opinion and photograph. It is a Twitter feed in glorious technicolour, complete with pictures, polls and videos. It exists to make sure you know exactly how much more popular everyone else is, casually informing you that 14 of your friends were tagged in the album “Fun without Tom Meltzer”. It can be, to say the least, disheartening. Without a real-world social network with which to interact, social networking sites act as proof of the old cliché: you’re never so alone as when you’re in a crowd.

The pressures put on teenagers by sites such as Facebook are well-known. Reports of cyber-bullying, happy-slapping, even self-harm and suicide attempts motivated by social networking sites have become increasingly common in the eight years since Friendster – and then MySpace, Bebo and Facebook – launched. But the subtler side-effects for a generation that has grown up with these sites are only now being felt. In March this year, the NSPCC published a detailed breakdown of calls made to ChildLine in the last five years. Though overall the number of calls from children and teenagers had risen by just 10%, calls about loneliness had nearly tripled, from 1,853 five years ago to 5,525 in 2009. Among boys, the number of calls about loneliness was more than five times higher than it had been in 2004.

Access the rest of the article online at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/aug/07/social-networking-friends-lonely

The Telegraph reports that social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter are costing the British economy up to £14 billion a year in lost working time, a new survey has suggested.

Over half of British employees admitted to updating their personal Twitter, Facebook and MySpace profiles while at work, while a third said they spent half an hour a day using the websites.

Two million people – or six per cent of Britain’s 34 million-strong workforce – admitted wasting more than an hour every day adding friends, uploading pictures and videos and tweeting.

The resulting drop in workers’ productivity could be costing British businesses as much as £14 billion a year, according to an analysis by a network of jobs websites.

But many workers were in denial about the negative effects of using work time to look at social networking sites, the survey of 1,000 British employees by MyJobGroup showed.

Only 14 per cent of those polled admitted to being less productive as a result of social media, and 10 per cent claimed that using Facebook and Twitter at work boosted their productivity.

Two thirds of the workers surveyed opposed a ban on social networking while at work.

A similar study conducted last year suggested that half of all British workers were using Twitter and Facebook for around 40 minutes a week.

Lee Fayer, Managing Director of MyJobGroup said: “Our results clearly show that UK workers are spending increased time whilst at work on social media networks, which, left unchecked, could have negative repercussions on the productivity of many companies across the country.

“Whilst we’re certainly not kill-joys, people spending over an hour per day in work time on the likes of Facebook and Twitter are seriously hampering companies’ efforts to boost productivity, which is more important than ever given the fragile state of our economy.

“Companies would do well to monitor use of social networking sites during work hours and ensure that their employees are not abusing their freedom of access to these sites.”

A survey last year disclosed that one in three workers surveyed had seen sensitive company information posted on social networking sites, leading to fears about how workers use the internet.

Staff at PC World and Currys were last year found to have posted offensive comments about customers on Facebook groups.

Some posters who said they were employed by the shops’ parent company, DSG, said certain customers deserved to be punched, and asked if they should be allowed to “cattle prod” them. British Airways staff used Facebook to complain about customers’ “stupid American accents” in 2008, while Virgin Atlantic employees referred to some passengers as “chavs”.

Access the original article online at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/7924231/Twitter-and-Facebook-costing-economy-14bn-a-year.html

Internet addicts more likely to develop depression

The Independent has reported on a Chinese study that has revealed teenagers who spend excessive amounts of time on the Internet are one and a half times more likely to develop depression than moderate web users.

Researcher Lawrence Lam described some of the signs of excessive use spending at least five to more than 10 hours a day on the web, agitation when the teens is not in front of the computer and loss of interest in social interaction.

“Some spend more than 10 hours a day, they are really problematic users and they show signs and symptoms of addictive behavior … browsing the Internet, playing games,” said Lam, co-author of the paper which was published on Tuesday in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

“They can’t get their minds off the Internet, they feel agitated if they don’t get back on after a short period of being away,” the psychologist at Sydney’s University of Notre Dame’s School of Medicine said in a telephone interview.

“They don’t want to see friends, don’t want to join family gatherings, don’t want to spend time with parents or siblings.”

The study involved 1,041 teenagers aged between 13 and 18 years in China’s southern Guangzhou city who were free of depression at the start of the investigation.

Nine months later, 84 of them were assessed as suffering from depression and those who were on the Internet excessively were one-and-a-half times more vulnerable than moderate users.

“Results suggested that young people who are initially free of mental health problems but use the Internet pathologically could develop depression as a consequence,” wrote Lam, who co-authored the paper with Zi-wen Peng at the Sun Yat-Sen University’s School of Public Health in Guangzhou.

The depression might be a result of lack of sleep and stress from competitive online games, he explained.

“People who spend so much time on the Internet will lose sleep and it is a very well established fact that the less one sleeps, the higher the chances of depression,” Lam said.

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/internet-addicts-more-likely-to-develop-depression-2042069.html

Facebook extends privacy controls to mobile

The Telegraph reports that Facebook has extended its privacy controls to mobile devices, meaning anyone can control what information is publicly seen about them on the site, while on the move.

Facebook has been linked to a resurgence in the sexually-transmitted disease syphilis, according to health experts. In May 2010, as a response to international criticism of Facebook’s increasingly complex privacy toolset, it amended its privacy controls, making them ‘simpler’ to use.

At the time co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said the site “missed the mark” on allowing its users to easily control whether, for instance, their age, gender, friends or pictures were visible to the public.

Zuckerberg introduced “one simple control” to let users decide how they want to share their Facebook profile information, in addition to adding the ability to adjust privacy settings on a granular level.

“This applies to all the products we’re going to release going forward,” he added, “As well as retroactively. If you’ve set your profile so your information is viewable only to friends of friends, then all future features will also only be viewable to friends of friends.”

The social networking company, which signed up its 500 millionth registered user last month, has now made the entire suite of Facebook privacy controls available from any mobile device.

This means people will be able to change how much personal information is publicly available about them while on the move. Facebook says that more than 150 million users currently access the site through their mobile devices – a number expected to grow rapidly as an increased number of people move over to smartphones with affordable internet bundles.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/7926918/Facebook-extends-privacy-controls-to-mobile.html

Concerned about your data? Join the Facebook Union

The Guardian technology writer Jemima Kiss has commented that with every new user, Facebook’s insight and influence in our lives grows and it is now, by most estimates, the most-used website in the world.

The site has pledged to always be free – and that’s the biggest indication yet of how confident Facebook is that our personal data is valuable enough to continue to expand its business.

After a few high-profile but ultimately impotent protests by some early adopters, the backlash over Facebook’s use of data seemed to die down. But in tune with growing public awareness over the control of personal data, a new Facebook union is providing one coherent and off-Facebook hub for discussion.

“Online tools really aren’t free. We pay for them with micropayments of personal information.”

With just 19 members, the Facebook Users’ Union is definitely more a concept than a campaign force. “It’s a statement that would love to develop into a movement,” the creator of the page told me. Richard Buchanan,  a freelance ad creative, says that people are effectively working for free to create wealth for Facebook’s shareholders.

Buchanan wants someone – the Guardian, perhaps – to calculate the value of each Facebook user, based on how much money Facebook (or Google, or MySpace) makes from advertising next to their information.

“It may be a small amount but it adds up when scaled into the half billion. Thus I feel we, the users, should have a say in how the profit gets distributed. We should be able to donate some of our annual value to good causes.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/pda/2010/aug/04/facebook-union

The Independent reports that hackers are weighing in on the Facebook privacy controversy with creations that help people strengthen privacy or empty profile pages at the world’s leading social networking service.

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) technology fellow Chris Conley showed off an arsenal of such applications at the infamous DefCon gathering, which kicked off Friday in Las Vegas. “They are needed because people don’t have control of their privacy and don’t really understand,” Conley said after the presentation. “They give people options.”

A program written by Conley displays pictures, posts, or other profile data being accessed by applications at Facebook accounts. People can then see what personal information programs are gleaning from their pages.

News stories about privacy control issues at Facebook may slip people’s minds by the time they sit down at their computers, but Conley’s application grabs their attention with a winning subject – themselves.

“People love to hear about themselves, that is the thing that Facebook is great at,” said Ceren Ercen, who worked briefly for the California company and wore a T-shirt bearing the words “Disgruntled Facebook ex-employee. People don’t have the attention spans to carry over concerns they have to actual Facebook usage.”

Ercen added that during her brief stint at Facebook she had “serious problems” regarding the privacy of users and that she wasn’t alone.

Applications shared by Conley included a software tool that helps people change Facebook privacy settings using simple color coding to demystify the process.

Other programs let people pack-up Facebook profile data in order to take it elsewhere or stop the social-networking service getting automated feedback about where members go elsewhere on the Internet.

“The long-term goal is they should become obsolete because Facebook has addressed this in some way,” Conley said. “We would like Facebook to be doing this.”

Conley’s application, available online, at dotrights.org has been used by 150,000 people.

“I think people don’t see the real potential damage of their information going out the door,” a DefCon veteran who asked not to be named said after attending Conley’s presentation.

Facebook this week launched a Web page devoted to staying safe on the Internet.

The “Safety Page” highlights news and initiatives focused on ways people can keep data secure at the social-networking community.

The new page augments a virtual Safety Center that Facebook introduced in April and was based on a “security page” that boasted more than 2.2 million “fans.”

The number of people using Facebook recently topped the 500 million mark, meaning one in every 14 people on the planet has now signed up to the social network.

The launch of the Safety Page came in the wake of demands by the ACLU and other privacy activists and governments that Facebook give users more control over the use of their personal data.

A coalition of privacy groups, in an open letter to Facebook co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg last month, welcomed the social network’s recent overhaul of its privacy controls but said additional steps were needed.

Access the original article online at: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/hackers-pick-up-where-facebook-privacy-leaves-off-2041847.html

Facebook data harvester speaks out

The BBC speaks to the man who harvested and published the personal details of 100m Facebook users has spoken out about his motives. Ron Bowes, a security consultant, used a piece of code to scan Facebook profiles, collecting data not hidden by the user’s privacy settings. The list, which contains the URL of every searchable Facebook user’s profile, name and unique ID, has been shared as a downloadable file.

Mr Bowes told BBC News that he did it as part of his work on a security tool. “I’m a developer for the Nmap Security Scanner and one of our recent tools is called Ncrack,” he said.  “It is designed to test password policies of organisations by using brute force attacks; in other words, guessing every username and password combination.”

By downloading the data from Facebook, and compiling a user’s first initial and surname, he was able to make a list of the most common probable usernames to use in the tool. The three most common names, he found, were jsmith, ssmith and skhan.

In theory, researchers could then combine this list with a catalogue of the most commonly used passwords to test the security of sites. Similar techniques could be used by criminals for more nefarious means.

Mr Bowes said his original plan was to “collect a good list of human names that could be used for these tests”.

“Once I had the data, though, I realised that it could be of interest to the community if I released it, so I did,” he added.

Mr Bowes confirmed that all the data he harvested was already publicly available but acknowledged that if anyone now changed their privacy settings, their information would still be accessible.

“If 100,000 Facebook users decide that they no longer want to be in Facebook’s directory, I would still have their name and URL but it would no longer, technically, be public,” he said.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10802730

Customer outrage over TalkTalk monitoring web use

The Telegraph reports that TalkTalk, the UK’s second largest internet service provider, has admitted secretly monitoring the web usage of its 4.2 million customers.

The company began generating a list of websites being visited across its whole network at the start of July, in a bid to identify potential sources of viruses. The issue only came to light after several customers began noticing that their browsing activity was being monitored by an by a company under the name of Opal Telecoms, which is TalkTalk’s business to business division. A number of customers who run their own websites and check who has visited each day are understood to have contacted Talk Talk querying the unexplained activity.

Mark Schmid, TalkTalk’s communications director, said that the whole monitoring process is “completely legal” and that there was no need to inform the company’s customer base before beginning the trial, as all data has been anonymised.

“We are not monitoring each user’s personal web usage but instead generating a list of websites which are being connected to across our network, and then scanning those sites for potential malware. We are not connecting people’s personal IP address [which identifies individual computers] to each website visited,” he explained.

Malware is malicious software that can cause computer viruses. Talk Talk is planning to build a system that will allow users to avoid risky sites and says it needs the data from customers to improve the tool’s effectiveness.

However, Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, an organisation that campaigns for greater online freedom, said there was “thin line” that companies should be careful not to cross when using interception technology.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/7916764/Customer-outrage-over-TalkTalk-monitoring-web-use.html

Facebook makes move into search with Questions

The BBC reports that Facebook has made its first steps into the search market. The social network has launched a trial of a feature called Questions, which allows people to pose queries to the site’s 500 million users.

The service has been rolled out to a select group of Facebook members and will “evolve over time”, the site said. It will go head-to-head with other services such as Yahoo Answers, Twitter and search engines such as ask.com.

“The core of search is a question,” said Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of the blog Search Engine Land. “For thousands of years we asked questions of people that we trusted. Then around 15 years ago we underwent an incredible revolution with the arrival of search engines.”

Mr Sullivan said Questions was a return to this age of more personalised search. “You can now put questions out there in a way we used to do before everyone was online,” he said.

Earlier this year, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said that the future of the web was one where friends, or what he called “your social graph”, guide you online. Many interpreted this as a direct challenge to the dominance of Google’s automated search.

However, said Mr Sullivan, Questions was not going “to kill Google. It’s very difficult to challenge Google as general search leader. Indexing and ranking the web is very expensive and Facebook has no skills in doing that. But what they do have is social connections, which allows users to put out those questions to others who they trust.”

The new feature allows people to quiz the entire Facebook community by clicking on the “Ask Question” button.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10793009