Facebook
might be inadvertently outing its gay users to advertisers, according to a new
study.
Researchers have discovered that different targeted advertising is
being sent to users' accounts if they have described themselves as gay
or straight.
The discovery could mean that people who wish to keep their sexuality
private may be sharing it with advertisers without their knowledge.
A team from Microsoft and Germany's Max Planck Institute created six
fake profiles: two straight men, two straight women, a gay man and a
lesbian. They wanted to see if Facebook targeted ads based on sexuality,
and so the profiles were left otherwise completely the same.
The team then monitored what ads each virtual user was sent over a
period of a week. They found that the ads displayed on the gay man's
profile differed substantially from those on the straight one. Many of
these adverts were not obviously adverts for services that only gay men
would require, and half of them did not mention the word gay in
the text.
The researchers write in the paper: The danger with such ads,
unlike the gay bar ad where the target demographic is blatantly obvious,
is that the user reading the ad text would have no idea that by clicking
it he would reveal to the advertiser both his sexual-preference and a
unique identifier (cookie, IP address, or email address if he signs up
on the advertiser's site).
The loophole means that any advertisers who collect data such as
Facebook IDs could match a person's sexual preference with their unique
ID and their name.
Last week it emerged that vast amounts of data – including the names
of individual members and their online friends – were passed to
internet advertising firms, with tens of millions of people thought to
have been affected. The leaks were possible even when members had
deliberately set their privacy options to the maximum secrecy levels.
Security experts warned that the details could be used – when
combined with other publicly available information – to build up a
detailed picture of an individual's interests, friendship circle and
lifestyle.
Around 25 different advertising and data firms were receiving the
information, an investigation by the Wall Street Journal found. It was
passed to them by firms whose apps – games and other features –
operate on Facebook and not by the social networking site itself.
Google
has announced that it was placing 60 of its Web services under a
unified privacy policy that would allow the company to share data
between any of those services. (Google Books, Google Wallet and
Google Chrome are excluded due to different regulatory and technical
issues.) 
A
small group of British MPs have signed up to an Early Day Motion
voicing concern that Google are set to plunder user data for advert serving
purposes. 
When
new rules governing the way companies collect and use data about our movements
online come into force, a little i symbol will appear on screen to reveal
adverts generated by cookies. Many internet users find these digital
devices, which are used by websites to create personal profiles based on use of
the Internet, intrusive.
Changes
made by Google to its privacy policy are in breach of European law, the
EU's justice commissioner has said.