Yahoo To Offer Y Connect; While Facebook Undergoes Privacy Scrutiny

Yahoo to Offer Media Links from the Wall Street Journal reports Yahoo will create a similar tool to Facebook connect for their media publishers, web developers and other websites to integrate with.

Yahoo would not comment on the new system, but the purpose behind it is to help Yahoo better track users around the web, so they can offer more tailored ads and offer advertisers better ad targeting options.

Y Connect allows users to register and log into web sites by clicking on a Yahoo button. After the user logs in, their activity on the web site can be shared with Yahoo. This shared data can be used for advertising purposes or to make Yahoo’s products better.

I do find it funny that this news came out slightly ahead of the major Facebook privacy breach the Wall Street Journal uncovered. The Wall Street Journal reported:

Many of the most popular applications, or “apps,” on the social-networking site Facebook Inc. have been transmitting identifying information—in effect, providing access to people’s names and, in some cases, their friends’ names—to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.

The issue affects tens of millions of Facebook app users, including people who set their profiles to Facebook’s strictest privacy settings. The practice breaks Facebook’s rules, and renews questions about its ability to keep identifiable information about its users’ activities secure.

Facebook responded basically saying it was a mistake and the press have “exaggerated” the issue but there was an issue:

Recently, it has come to our attention that several applications built on Facebook Platform were passing the User ID (UID), an identifier that we use within our APIs, in a manner that violated this policy. In most cases, developers did not intend to pass this information, but did so because of the technical details of how browsers work.

There is tons of coverage on the Facebook Privacy breach on Techmeme.

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Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on social media at @rustybrick, +BarrySchwartz and Facebook. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio and disclosures, click over here.