Online walls falling by Claudia Sonea

Are you tired of making a new profile every time you get an account on a new site? Well, all your troubles might be over, now that technology is moving forward and online social networks are developing. Programs allowing users to swing from one site to another without creating new accounts are being created. As it is, News Corp.'s MySpace and Facebook announced to give us- the users- tools allowing Web sites to get profile data, friends' lists and other social functions due to their increasing demand. Google is also joining these efforts, although the networks haven't reached to an agreement. The main issue is privacy and how to prevent its breaking. Web sites like eBay will be able to get profile data from MySpace and Facebook and everything will be up to date because the third-party sites are not permitted to store the data received. Friend Connect that Google created in order to bridge various networks like Facebook, Google Talk, Google's Orkut, LinkedIn, Plaxo and hi5 seemed to come closer to the ideal tracked by these new wave of changes of the social networks, bur Facebook began to block it only after a few days by sustaining, Google doesn't assures the privacy of the users. Not even between Facebook and MySpace there isn't any agreement. The refusal is regarded by some like Deborah Pierce, who tracks social-networking privacy as executive director of Privacy Activism, as a way of retaining control. From this entire quarrel, probably we will be affected as users. Indeed some of us would rather not share our profile on the Web. Yet, they could invent ways to make programs protecting the accounts and information. Will that happen soon?

related story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080524/ap_on_hi_te/online_data_walls;_ylt=AgIx5IHezP8mbhiX3quJIZus0NUE

by Claudia Sonea for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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