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Privacy campaigners have welcomed a suggestion that Facebook may finally be about to ask it’s users to opt into any changes in the way it uses their personal information.The social network previously announced alterations to its members’ settings without asking for fresh consent.

The website is changing its policy after an investigation by the US Federal Trade Commission, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.

The report suggests the site has also agreed to privacy audits by an independent organisation over the next 20 years.

“Facebook has historically been extremely resistant to transparency in its own operations, so we welcome measures that would force the company to obtain express consent of its users,” said the advocacy group Privacy International.

“However, it seems likely that the FTC’s demands will only present a temporary obstacle in the path of Facebook’s ambitions to collect its users’ information.

“Faced with reams of small print, most users are likely to automatically agree to policy changes, with each change bringing us one step closer to Zuckerberg’s vision of a privacy-free future.”

The FTC’s intervention is being linked to the Washington-based campaign group, Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).

It filed a complaint with the commission in December 2009 claiming that privacy setting changes “violate user expectations, diminish user privacy and contradict Facebook’s own representations”.

EPIC noted that the website’s users, security experts and others had voiced opposition to the change.

The organisation filed a follow-up complaint in 2010 claiming the social network had violated consumer protection law.

This year, EPIC also asked the FTC to investigate Facebook’s use of facial recognition software on users’ uploaded photographs and changes that gave the firm “far greater ability to disclose the personal information of its users to its business partners”.

Facebook says it has more than 800 million members who have used the site at least once in the past 30 days.

Legal experts say any settlement with the FTC is likely to have implications for other internet firms.

Visits to video sharing websites by UK users have gone up by more than a third in the last year.The biggest driver of traffic to those sites is music videos (33%), followed by TV shows (17%), film (11%), gaming (10%) and news (9%).

The figures, from internet research company Experian Hitwise, show YouTube accounts for nearly 70% of all video website hits.

It’s now the third most popular site in the UK after Google and Facebook.

Lady Gaga was the most in demand for artist within music searches.

The research was gathered between September 2010 and September 2011.

During that time 240 million hours every month were spent by British internet users watching videos online.

UK’s top 10 websites:

Google UK
Facebook
YouTube
eBay UK
Windows Live Mail
MSN UK
Google.com
BBC News
BBC Homepage
Yahoo! UK & Ireland

Research by Experian Hitwise

Illustrating its dominance in this area, Google owned YouTube, clocked up 184 million of those hours.

That number is still dwarfed by the amount of time spent on social networking sites though.

The same research shows 800 million hours were spent each month on sites like Facebook and Twitter by the UK’s internet users.

Despite YouTube’s dominance of video sharing websites there was also strong growth for other ones too.

BBC iPlayer, the second most popular video site, experienced a 22% rise in traffic last year.

That means the number of visits to the site has doubled in the last three years.

Facebook has outlined plans to encourage users to share more of the media they consume – including music and movies with friends- as well as once again changing their users’ security options.Its founder Mark Zuckerberg also unveiled a dramatic redesign to the website, replacing user profiles with an audio visual timeline of their life.

The updates were revealed at Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference.

A wave of new features in recent weeks have been welcomed by some users and caused annoyance to many others.

Facebook’s latest changes point to a desire to keep users engaged through new features, in the midst of rapid innovation from social networking rivals.

The site’s application platform has been redesigned to allow users to share what they are consuming on streaming music services such as Spotify, and the movie rental site Netflix.

Depending on privacy settings, users will be able to see what friends are doing – for example, playing a song – then listen-in themselves.

Mr Zuckerberg said he wanted to create, what he called, “real time serendipity”.

“Being able to click on someone’s music is a great experience, but knowing you helped a friend discover something new and they liked your taste in music, and that you now have that in common is awesome,” he added.

Facebook said that users would only be able to do as much on the site as its media partners allowed in each country, so free music sharing through streaming apps would only work where that service was already available outside Facebook.

Alongside the deeper integration of media content, the restyling of Facebook’s profile pages is also likely to prove a hot topic among users.

Identities will now be defined through a densely packed vertical timeline of major life events, made up of photos, videos and other items. The level of detail diminishes the further down a reader scrolls.

Profile pages had previously been limited to basic information along with a stream of every single item posted by a user.

Facebook stressed that all of its new offerings could be controlled by members using its recently simplified privacy controls.

In particular, it stressed that timeline items could be modified within the new “activity log”, allowing users to limit who can view certain events from their past.

The updates are expected to start appearing on users’ computers in coming weeks.

Google is marking its teenage years by turning its home page into a birthday party scene.Surrounded by multi-coloured balloons and streamers, its logo is adorned with party hats and sits behind a table heaped with wrapped presents and a large white birthday cake with 13 candles.

Although Google’s founders Stanford University graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin built their first search engine in 1996, it was not until 1998 when the graduated with PhDs that they formalised their research and created Google.

The company filed for incorporation on September 4, 1998, and the Google.com domain was registered on September 15. The search engine officially celebrates its birthday on September 27.

The pair came up with the name as a play on the word “googol”, the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros.

“The name reflects the immense volume of information that exists and the scope of Google’s mission: To organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” claims Google.

The anniversary comes at a time when the company faces increasing legislative scrutiny and is locked in intense rivalries with the social networking site Facebook and smart phone operator Apple.

The search engine recently launched its Google+ social networking service to all users, in an effort to counter Facebook’s rising popularity.

However, other research shows that Google enjoys a 90 per cent share of the global internet search market and over 30% of the smart phone OS market.

More than a third of teachers have been subject to online abuse, according to a survey conducted by Plymouth University.The majority of the abuse – 72% – came via pupils but over a quarter was initiated by parents.

The majority of teachers claiming online abuse were women.

Much of the abuse is via chat on social networks but the study also found that many were setting up Facebook groups specifically to abuse teachers.

In some cases, people posted videos of teachers in action on YouTube while others put abusive comments on ratemyteacher.com.

In total, 35% of teachers questioned said they had been the victim of some form of online abuse. Of these, 60% were women.

Perhaps surprisingly, 26% of the abuse came from parents.

“This parental abuse is something we haven’t come across before,” said Prof Andy Phippen, the author of the report. “Sometimes they are abusing other children at the school as well. Schools need to clamp down on it, or it will increase in prevalence,” he warned.

The cases of children suffering online bullying have been well-documented but the issue of teachers being abused is less well known.

But it is a growing problem. The National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) said that it receives calls every week from teachers who believe they have been cyberbullied.

The study took testimony from more than 300 professionals in an anonymous internet-based survey and followed up with a handful of in-depth interviews.

Many of these revealed the human cost such cyberbullying was having.

The guidance service referred to is the Professional Online Safety Helpline, a new initiative from the Safer Internet Centre.

For Prof Phippen the phenomenon illustrates a shift in how parents and children address issues at school.

“It seems to a subset of the population the teacher is no longer viewed as someone who should be supported in developing their child’s education, but a person whom it is acceptable to abuse if they dislike what is happening in the classroom,” said Prof Phippen.

“Clearly some people are viewing social media as a bypass to the traditional routes (head teacher, board of governors) of discussing dissatisfaction with the school,” he added.

A leading German privacy official has accused Facebook of using face recognition software in a manner that violates German and European law.Facebook was also scolded for collecting and storing biometric data without users’ consent

Johannes Caspar, a data protection expert with the city of Hamburg, called on the US-based social networking company to delete from its site the individual biometric data it has collected.

“If the users’ data falls into the wrong hands, it would be possible to compare and identify anybody captured in a photo taken with a mobile phone,” Mr Caspar told the Hamburger Abenblatt newspaper.

The programme allows Facebook users to locate new “Friends” after discovering their identity through a biometric data scan.

The programme tries to match data captured in a picture with the trove of data it has already collected from its hundreds of millions of users.

“This is what’s most problematic. The programme feeds off a stock of data designed to physically identify millions of users,” he said.

He further scolded Facebook for collecting and storing biometric data without users’ consent, insisting the practice violates privacy laws.

Germany, which is considered a leader on Internet privacy issues, has criticised Google for its “Street View” programme, which makes street-level images freely available online.

German officials also previously urged Facebook to beef up its privacy protections, notably over its Friend Finder feature, which allowed the site to register or even import users’ entire email address books without notifying them.

Doctors are being warned to take extra care when using social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter.
The British Medical Association guidance highlighted a series of potential pitfalls doctors face.

In particular, it said there was a risk the lines between personal and professional lives could be blurred.

It comes after a series of cases in which NHS staff and other public sector workers have got into trouble through their use of social media.

In 2009, a group of doctors and nurses were suspended for posting pictures of themselves on Facebook lying down in unusual places, including a hospital helipad.

And last year a civil servant found herself in the newspapers after using her Twitter account to make political points and saying she was struggling with a hangover.

Dr Tony Calland, chairman of the BMA’s medical ethics committee, said: “Medical professionals should be wary of who could access their personal material online, how widely it could be shared and how it could be perceived by their patients and colleagues.”

The guidance advises both doctors and medical students to adopt conservative privacy settings where they are available.

It also warns them against making informal or derogatory comments about patients or colleagues as well as not accepting current or past patients as friends on Facebook.

Dr Search warns that not only does Facebook have a number of personal security issues, but the lack of effective segmentation between types of friends, family and colleagues means the risk of cross data transfers are high.

Facebook and Skype have announced a partnership to add video chat to the social networking site.

Facebook and Skype have teamed up before – they already share some instant messaging tools.

Skype is in the process of being bought by Microsoft- which is a major shareholder in Facebook.

The new video-call service was launched by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who also revealed that the site now had more than 750 million users.

However, he contradicted himself by saying that the total number of active users was no longer a useful measure of the site’s success.

Instead, the amount of sharing – of photographs, videos and web links – was a better indication of how people engaged with the site, explained Mr Zuckerberg.

Coming hard on the heels of Google+, Facebook’s Skype offering is likely to be compared to its rival’s Hangout feature. That product allows up to ten people to chat at any one time, while the Facebook/Skype video chat feature facilitates just one-on-one video chatting.

Skype did hint that there will be added features in future, but Google has stolen the lion’s share of the headlines and Facebook will not enjoy being seen as following in its footsteps.

At the launch in California, Mark Zuckerberg was reluctant to get involved in a tit for tat comparison but he did say that he saw such products as part of the narrative that in future companies which have not traditionally looked at social networking will be layering it on top of all their products.

Mr Zuckerberg said that it was likely that other “premium” Skype functions would be added in future.

He also appeared to offer a back-handed compliment to Google+, saying that its creation was a vindication of Facebook’s vision for the social web.

Google has launched a new social media offering entitled Plus (that’s +) – to mixed reviews.A number of people have been researching Google Plus and whilst there is disagreement it seems to be a qualified success.

At first glance many people will dismiss Google Plus as a derivative of Facebook. This was also true of the ill-fated Buzz.

But this is a much better and more thoughtfully designed product than Buzz- with better security settings.

Accordingly the interface is familiar and relatively intuitive but Google Plus still takes some getting used to.

Some have already criticised Google Plus as a “reactive” product, simply mimicking Facebook with some security tweaks.

Google’s radically different product Google Wave crashed and burned because people didn’t really know what it was or how to use it.

It was too scary unfamiliar. Plus plays it safer and is less of a departure from the known universe of social media tools (Facebook, Twitter) than Wave was from email, for example.

Google has learned the painful lesson of Buzz and has taken enormous pains to attend to privacy in the overall design and experience of the product.

It’s very easy to add people and organize them into standard or customized groups. This is one of the things that immediately impressed me, as well as the attention to privacy and selective sharing.

There’s lots of control over who sees what updates, etc. You’re also able filter all messages and updates by category to see only those from “friends” or “professional” contacts. On the Plus homepage you can click down the list and get selective views from each of your groups:

Users can create and manage groups (“Circles”) very easily once you understand how Plus is organized. This takes relatively little time.

Google says Plus isn’t a Facebook competitor. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

Whether or not it’s intended as a Facebook competitor, it’s definitely not a “Facebook killer.” However its privacy controls and selective group communication tools will appeal to some turned off by Facebook’s aggressive pushing of privacy boundaries and buttons.

Twitter’s UK audience jumped by a third in May 2011 following the Ryan Giggs super injunction leaks, which drove a huge number of female pensioners to the site.As a result of the Ryan Giggs super injunction row social media company Twitter enjoyed its highest ever UK audience last month, with 6.1 million British people visiting the site, up 34 per cent on April’s figures, says Nielsen-UKOM, a UK online measurement company.

Twitter’s monthly audience boost was helped by a 65 per cent increase in the number of over 50s men, aged between 50 to 64, accessing the site, and a doubling in the number of female pensioners (the over 65’s) going to Twitter.com to see the latest in the super-injunction row.

Both LinkedIn and Facebook also enjoyed record audience figures last month, also driven by a surge in their popularity amongst the over 50s age group.

During May 2011, 26.8 million Britons visited Facebook, which is the highest ever audience figure the social network has attracted in the UK, propelling it for the first time above MSN, Microsoft’s news and email hub, making it the second most popular site in the country behind Google.

According to the Nielsen-UKOM figures, LinkedIn registered 3.6 million visits during May 2011, up 57 per cent on the same month last year.

Two years ago in the UK the profile of Facebook’s audience was skewed towards 18 to 34 year olds. However, the number of 50 to 64 year olds visiting the site has grown 84 per cent in the last 24 months.

While the number of UK visitors to the three biggest social networks continues to rise, the amount of time these audiences are spending on these sites is more mixed.

The average visitor to Facebook and LinkedIn is spending a little longer on those sites each month than they were two years ago, while the average visitor to Twitter appears to be spending a little less.