The US government is funding research into social networking sites and how to gather and store personal data published on them, according to the New Scientist magazine.
At the same time, US lawmakers are attempting to force the social networking sites themselves to control the amount and kind of information that people, particularly children, can put on the sites.
Social networking sites have enjoyed phenomenal recent success. Industry leader MySpace has attracted 85m members with new members joining at a rate of 250,000 per day. Users, most often young people, use their own pages to swap information about themselves, their hobbies, their friends and their favourite music and films.
That kind of information is the subject of a research paper by a team from the University of Maryland in Baltimore. The paper, Semantic Analytics on Social Networks, proposes methods for combining the data posted on social networking sites and other computer databases to reveal information about individuals.
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