Part one of this series of articles summarised which social networking sites I was going to take a look at from a data privacy standpoint - I’m hoping that if you read it, you found it interesting and will want to read this next article.

If you didn’t read it, you might want to take a look before you read this one!

I really wanted to see how much information these sites asked of you when signing up, how secure sign-up was and most importantly, what is done with your personal details.

Sites such as Facebook and MySpace say that they find it reasonable to collect and store personal information about users such as occupation, gender and personal interests in order to ‘maximise your enjoyment’ of their sites. Facebook quite eerily states that it may also search for information about you on blogs, newspapers and instant messaging services. Why on earth should they feel that this is appropriate? So that you can enjoy a more personalised service, apparently. Personally, I think that’s a bit much and would not in any way agree to this – but millions of people have done, by signing up to use Facebook, as this privacy encroachment forms part of the privacy policy that all users have to agree to having read and abide by when signing up.

Bebo says that it ‘may share profile information in a personally identifiable manner’, although it declines to go into any further detail. Interestingly, it also states that ‘We reserve the right to transfer your personal information in the event of a transfer of ownership of Bebo.com, such as acquisition by or merger with another company.’ So what happens if these sites do get bought by other organisations? The only site that I found addressed this was again, Bebo. It’s an important point to bear in mind – M&As are a complicated but hugely significant aspect of security. Whose security policies are followed? Whose security testing strategies are integrated into the new organisation? And which country will the merged organisation based in? These are just a few of a million questions that could arise in the eventuality of a merger or acquisition and with data privacy laws varying hugely between European and worldwide countries, it’s an important issue to examine.

Accepting Google’s privacy policy forms part of signing up to use YouTube and it’s another one that’s keen to improve your user experience – ‘We may combine personal information collected from you with information from other Google services or third parties to provide a better user experience’.

Yahoo! is another big corporate with social networking interests in the form of Flickr, the popular photo-sharing website. Its privacy terms state that ‘Once you register with Yahoo! and sign in to our services, you are not anonymous to us.’ It also plays the ‘user experience’ card and goes on to say that it uses personal data for three purposes – content customisation, ‘to fulfill your requests for certain products and services’ (whatever that may mean) and to flog you stuff.

Coming soon … social networking sites - data processing and storage