During the 4th week of Aug 2009 Richardson was quoted in the Toronto Star for a story about Facebook and privacy issues. Richardson said Facebook wants to keep users' information for its targeted ads, designed to appeal to different users' interests.
"They
save things we might think are benign like the number of clicks on a page,
what image has certain clicks, what the name of a file was,"
he said.
When
that information is put together with other information, Facebook is able
to find consumer trends, said Richardson, who teaches e-commerce
at the University of Toronto. While it should
be a wake up call for social networking sites, Richardson said
consumers
don't always understand they should use judgment about what they say on
the Internet. "We live in a celebrity generation where people want to be
more famous than cautious," he said from
Toronto. But he said it's an opportunity
for social networking sites to use better privacy policies as a opportunity
to bring more people to their site and get more business.."
the original article was
written by journalist LuAnn LaSalle of CP www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/686928
