News item

Senior staff attorney Chris Jay Hoofnagle commented on Facebook’s “social advertising” plan. A New York Times article, “Facebook Is Marketing Your Brand Preferences (With Your Permission),” discusses how Facebook, a social networking site, is displaying user profile pictures with commercial messages. A Facebook user can rate or recommend a product and then an ad for that product will be sent to the user’s friends. However, this new plan comes with growing privacy concerns that advertisers may have access to too much information regarding user activities.  read more »

Senior staff attorney Chris Jay Hoofnagle was quoted in an article regarding online privacy. The article entitled “Do Consumers Care About Online Privacy?” discusses how consumers perceive online privacy. Hoofnagle comments: “Consumers fundamentally misunderstand the rules of the marketplace.” He also cites studies in which up to 75% of consumers think as long as a site has a privacy policy it means it won’t share data with third parties. He states that consumers “…equate the presence of the policy with substantive privacy rules.”  read more »