- Facebook games — Mafia Wars, FarmVille, Restaurant City — have become surprisingly effective at diverting time wasters among the social-networking crowd. More than 63 million people alone play FarmVille. But now accusations have surfaced that the games can lead some more gullible players, including children, into Internet scams, especially if they have a cell phone.
- Facebook published a long blog post today about their enforcement efforts around app advertising and offer scams. And while they didn’t mention all the negative press that has hit them this week, that’s the reason for the new communication. Facebook says that deceptive ads are a widespread problem on the Web (which is true), and they say they’ve been fighting these scams for some time (which is also true, albeit a little slowly sometimes). They point to their updated policies on third party ads on the Facebook platform from July, which are aggressively pro-user but have rarely been enforced. They also note that they have disabled two ad networks since then, and are disabling two more now.
- For the last decade or so, Internet service providers have been dealing with requests to block access to pornographic or copyright-infringing Web sites, or in China, ones that dare to criticize the government. Now a U.S. House of Representatives bill is taking the unusual step of requiring Internet providers to block access to online financial scams that fraudulently invoke the Securities Investor Protection Corporation–or face fines and federal court injunctions. The House Financial Services Committee approved the legislation on Wednesday by a 41 to 28 vote.
Any Internet service provider that, on or through a system or network controlled or operated by the Internet service provider, transmits, routes, provides connections for, or stores any material containing any misrepresentation (of the SIPC) shall be liable for any damages caused thereby, including damages suffered by the SIPC, if the Internet service provider…is aware of facts or circumstances from which it is apparent that the material contains a misrepresentation.
That wording is so broad it could be extended to include illegitimate scam references contained in e-mail or other transmissions like VoIP, something that obviously worries carriers. It looks like that language is already in the process of being removed or modified. It seems unlikely that this bill makes it very far given the muscle most of the major broadband providers have on K Street.
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