"LIKE" Button in Facebook : Tracks u!!!

1.   Internet users tap Facebook Inc.'s "Like" and Twitter Inc.'s "Tweet" buttons to share content with friends. But these tools also let their makers collect data about the websites people are visiting.

2.   These so-called social widgets, which appear atop stories on news sites or alongside products on retail sites, notify Facebook and Twitter that a person visited those sites even when users don't click on the buttons, according to a study done for The Wall Street Journal.Few things about these widgets :

- Prolific widgets

- Already added to millions of web pages in the past year. 

- The widgets, which were created to make it easy to share content with friends and to help websites attract visitors, are a potentially powerful way to track Internet users. 

- They could link users browsing habits to their social-networking profile.

- For example, Facebook or Twitter know when one of their members reads an article about filing for bankruptcy on MSNBC.com or goes to a blog about depression called Fighting the Darkness, even if the user doesn't click the "Like" or "Tweet" buttons on those sites.

- A person only needs to log into Facebook or Twitter once in the past month. The sites will continue to collect browsing data, even if the person closes their browser or turns off their computers, until that person explicitly logs out of their Facebook or Twitter accounts.

- Facebook places a cookie on the computer of anyone who visits the Facebook.com home page, even if the user isn't a member. 

3.   Thanks http://online.wsj.com

Mobiles & Brain Cancer : WHO Speaks.

1. In an earlier post at http://anupriti.blogspot.com/2009/10/radiation-effects-ur-mobile-quantified.html,wherein the sad and bad effects of using mobiles on brain and health,the quantified SAR ie specific absorption rate were discussed.There is good news for those who always feared using mobile phones for standing at a risk to gain brain cancer in the long run.The WHO study on links between mobile phone use and certain types of brain cancer has proved inconclusive.The researchers said that even though there could be possible health risks from heavy mobile phone use, nothing conclusive has been found as yet.

2. The long ten year study of about 13,000 people focused on both healthy users of mobile phones and those with two types of brain cancer - glioma and miningioma tumors. There were suggestions of an increased risk of glioma, and much less so meningioma, in the users with highest decile (10 per cent) of cumulative call time, in subjects who reported phone use on the same side of the head as their tumor. Strangely though, the study declares these 10 per cent to be people who use their phone to call for more than 30 minutes a day. These stats seem seriously doubtable. Going by it, almost everyone we know is in that 10 percent.

3. However, the study has been criticized, as biased, because mobile phone companies provided 25 percent of the funding.Actually...now it is more then 15 years when the world has been actively using mobiles...more so in india in last 10 years....had it been the other way...how much of the human populi in the world would have been effected by now....

4. More at http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs193/en/