IBGerm

NEW YORK – It is a common fear among users of Facebook and other social media around the world — how to deal with a friend request from your boss or employee.

A survey released on Thursday found that 56 percent of Americans say it is irresponsible to be friends with a boss and 62 percent say it is wrong to be friends with an employee.But 76 percent believe it is acceptable to be friends with a workplace peer, according to the survey of 1,000 people by Liberty Mutual’s Responsibility Project. "When the roles change what do you do then? Do you unfriend someone if they have now been promoted to be your boss or if you’re now their boss," said researcher Kelly Holland.

"We get into some really sticky situations there in terms of what people will think is responsible," she said.

When using social media at work, 73 percent say it is not appropriate to update your Facebook status, 82 percent say you should not upload photos, 72 percent believe tweeting is wrong and 79 percent say it is not acceptable to watch online videos.

Yet 66 percent say it is fine to check your personal email while at work.

"When people focus on responsibility, they know what the responsible thing is to do but whether they are doing that in practice or not is a different story," said Holland.

Americans are split on whether companies should review the social media profiles of job candidates with 52 percent saying it is appropriate and 48 percent saying it is unacceptable.

Social media can also lead to some difficult decisions when it comes to family and relationships. Sixty percent of those polled say that it is "completely acceptable" to unfriend an ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend.

More than 40 percent of parents believe it is irresponsible to post photos of children online. Thirty one percent monitor their children’s Facebook accounts and almost 70 percent are friends with their children on Facebook or MySpace. But 72 percent limit the time their children spend on social media networks.

More than 80 percent of parents say that teachers should not interact with students online, but they are split when it comes to whether social media should be used as evidence to punish students’ behavior.

"The social media arena is incredibly complex in terms of responsibility," Holland said.

But despite the murkiness of social media responsibility, there is one area that nearly three-quarters of Americans agree on — they think it is "egotistical and a waste of time" to develop a Facebook page for a pet.

IDG News Service – Social networking sites MySpace and Facebook have apparently fixed coding errors that could have allowed an attacker access to all of their users’ data and photos.

The simple coding errors are alarming considering the extent to which social networks have gone to reassure their users that their data will be safe. The problem involved the way the sites handle requests for data from other domains, known as the "cross-domain policy."

Sites such as MySpace and Facebook typically block other domains from requesting and receiving data for privacy reasons, except for their own vetted  subdomains.

Facebook disallowed access from other applications on its main domain, but a developer in the Netherlands, Yvo Schaap, found that Facebook would allow data to be given out from one of its subdomains. 

Since the subdomain also hosted all of Facebook’s data, it would be possible to steal data by luring a victim to a URL with a Flash application rigged to grab the data if the victim had their auto-login enabled, which most people do, according to Schaap’s blog.

A "more invasive and hidden exploit could harvest all the user’s personal photos, data and messages to a central server without any trace, and there is no reason why this wouldn’t be happening already with both Facebook and MySpace data," Schaap wrote on his blog.

He also found the problem on MySpace, which allowed a domain called "farm.sproutbuilder.com" to access data. A Flash application could be uploaded to that site, which would then be allowed access to the data if a victim visited a malicious URL.

MySpace disagreed with the severity of the error, saying it would have only exposed information that was already public. The problem was with the sproutbuilder domain, and it has since been fixed, a spokeswoman said in an e-mailed statement.

"No public MySpace data was exposed and the vulnerability was never exploited," the statement read.

A look at Facebook’s latest crossdomain.xml file shows that the bug appears to have been fixed. MySpace also appears to have taken "farm.sproutbuilder.com" out of its cross-domain list.

In an e-mailed statement, Facebook said it "worked with the researcher who identified this issue to fix it. We have not received any reports that it was ever exploited."