Two thirds of cookies on sites are from third parties

"As UK companies scramble to comply with new laws requiring them to disclose and get permission for all the cookies they use, a new study has found that more than two thirds of all the bits of tracker code on websites are from third parties. Which means they are essentially for delivering targeted advertising or analysing behaviour across the website."

Source:  Data from Truste, reported by the Financial Times, 18th April 2012

'Up to' 70% of UK smartphone users have never looked at the terms & conditions of their apps

"Companies including Facebook and Apple are gaining access to swathes of private data from individuals who agree to the terms and conditions when they download an app.
But according to a poll, up to 70 per cent of smart phone users never read such terms and conditions, leaving personal information, including text messages, their location and contacts, unwittingly exposed.
An investigation by the Sunday Times found that the data accessed via apps is often transmitted to “third party” companies, including advertisers."

Source:  Daily Telegraph, 26th February 2012

(The Sunday Times is behind a paywall, so I can't link to the original)

45% of American 12 year olds have a profile on a social network

"Social networks like Facebook and MySpace are supposed to be limited to people who are ages 13 and up, but this is far from being the case, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which found that nearly half of American 12-year-olds -- 45% -- have profiles on these sites. Assuming the 12-year-old population has remained stable, around 3.96 million since the latest Census projections in 2009, that means 1.78 million 12-year-olds are evading Facebook’s age limits.
These figures, while large, don’t come as much of a surprise following an earlier estimate from Consumer Reports that 7.5 million children under the age of 13 are on Facebook, including five million children under the age of 10. And they’re in line with separate data from Harris Interactive, which found that half of parents with 12-year-olds know that their children are on Facebook. What’s more, seven out of ten of these parents actually actively helped their children evade the security protocols meant to prevent anyone from under age 13 getting on the site."
Source:  Mediapost, 25th November 2011

The top 50 passwords used by Gawker readers

Click to enlarge

Source:  WSJ blog, 13th December 2010
Note - Data comes from hackers who were able to access the site and extract the passwords.
Passwords in red are the names of Gawker sites - e.g. people were using the name of the site as their password

The ten most commonly used passwords

"1. 123456
2. 12345
3. 123456789
4. Password
5. iloveyou
6. princess
7. rockyou [i.e. the name of the site the user is accessing]
8. 1234567
9. 12345678
10. abc123"
Source: Data compiled from 32m passwords leaked from the company RockYou, analysed by Imperva, and reported by The Guardian, 21st January 2010

68 Percent of Saudi girls drop their last name on Facebook

"Dammam, Asharq Al-Awsat - Are you on Facebook under your real name? This is the question that continues to haunt a large number of Saudi Arabian women, despite the fact that internet social networking sites rely primarily on factual personal information. However a recent study carried out in Saudi Arabia shows that 68 percent of Saudi girls prefer to withhold their family name due to the sensitivity of this information, in comparison to just 32 percent of girls who appear on Facebook under their own full names. The study revealed that 16 percent of girls polled were members of Facebook under aliases or false identities. As for the Saudi Arabian boys who use Facebook, the study showed that 60 percent of those questioned were members of Facebook under their own full name, with just 4 percent appearing under an alias or a false name."
Source: Asharq Alawsat, 19th January 2010