The leading news this week have been online data security (yet again), with around 6.5 million passwords stolen from LinkedIn, the professional networking website, and eHarmony, the dating service, and the changes to Foursquare, which have made the social location app a much more interesting proposition for organisations and consumers alike – read our review of it here.
LinkedIn, supposedly the ‘professional’ social network, have not had a good week, with a Russian a hacker posting 6.5m of its users’ passwords online midweek – a small fraction of LinkedIn’s 150 million users, but still a significant breach – and LinkedIn themselves compounding the problem when it was revealed shortly afterwards by researchers that the network is scraping user data from their calendars in mobile Apple devices and sending private information back to LinkedIn’s servers
Facebook also caused a privacy stir this week (again, again) when it announced that it is considering giving the under 13s official access with parental guidance. Many under 13s already use the network unofficially, and this move would formalise that, with parental approval required at every turn, which could be a good thing, especially for social education.
However, while it would expand the network’s potential audience and therefore, one assumes, revenue, it is unclear how that would work in countries that have strict laws about advertising to children, and privacy concerns are bound to sky rocket, which is yet another concern for businesses and organisations using the site.
So once again Facebook opens a can of marketing worms with limited payoff in the short term and, with 50% of smartphones connecting to Facebook every hour of the day (an astounding statistic!), some might rightly say the network might be better spending its time and effort working out its mobile advertising to the audience it already has instead.
In other news, Alan Turing, the father of computer science, is one of 10 people who have been selected for the Britons of Distinction stamps; New features on Google Maps allow users of Google Earth to ‘fly’ over entire cities; Airtime adds to a growing choice of video chat services, but failed to impress observers at launch.
And finally, Starbucks have opted for a digital & social marketing campaign to support their sale of limited edition Emma Bridgewater British mugs between the Queen’s Jubilee and the Olympics. Ian Cranna, Starbucks marketing director, said the mugs would be “marketed through social media”.
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