Facebook's No3 advertiser is Microsoft search hjacker

Adage has detailed Facebook's growing advertising pool. Here's a chart of social networking's biggest ad sources..

Something that has caught the eye of many is Make-my-Baby.com, and well it might. Make-My-Baby.com is a spyware company that has gone from selling cell phone owners auto-recurring fees of $10-$20 each month, to peddling software that sets homepage and default search on browsers to Microsoft's Bing.

It is a site that allows you to put eyeglasses and mustaches on top of a funny looking baby's face. Hilarious. Well, that is what it seems to be….before you can do anything the site says you have to install "a browser plug-in to present an enhanced experience." If you do so, according to the fine print, your browser's default search and home page will be switched to Bing. Once you do so, the affiliate company behind the toolbar, called Zugo, will capture a slice of the revenue whenever you click on a search ad.

At best, Facebook is showing billions (literally) of spyware ads that trick users into installing browser-hijacking software.

Spooky Spokeo

We're not entirely sure how you are meant to pronounce ‘spokeo’, but for many it will read as ‘spooky-o’ because it certainly is spooky to say the least. Not in a hiding under the sheets, ghost and goblin way, but in a frightening data-protection type of way….

Type in some personal information into spokeo.com, for example, an e-mail address, and it will return *everything* to do with that e-mail that can be found in the public domain all in one neat package – your social networks, photo’s, images uploaded onto forums, comments, pretty much everything that is linked to that e-mail on the web. Worried yet? Well this is nothing compared to if you live in America. Type in any American resident name that you may know of, and up pops their home location, value of their house, a Google street map view of the home, their family tree, relationship status and more.

Frightening, but don’t hide under the sheets just yet…because this is your own 'fault'. All of this information has not been gained by illegal methods, it is simply acting as an API hub, roaming the web for anything that has been made public by yourself. Parts of forums are public, social networks (that are not secured by you) are for public viewing, photos you have uploaded via flickr are public…you get the idea… its more the fact that all of this information is in one place, and some revealing details that you may of thought as ‘private’ have been made public, such as your house value.

Thankfully, if you want this ghost story to end, you can ‘opt-out’ of your data being available to spokeo.com, although if you make another ‘public’ entry online afterwards the data will reset itself and you will be found once more.