A lot of buzz has been spreading around the World Wide Web about scams and deceptive ads reaching Facebook and MySpace – two of the most popular social networking communities online. The two social networking giants have decided to make commitments when it comes to tracking down all these misleading offers and scams.
A favorite target these days are the social gaming applications found in the networks. They have been found to allow certain types of scamming advertisements that urges users into a contract for services without disclosing the costs they will have to pay up front.
For instance, Farmville, a popular virtual farming simulation game, have users spend real money in order to buy virtual goods or to complete offers or surveys from their partner companies so that the users can have virtual credits. The problem lies in the fact that some of these offers have “opt out” riders that places the user in a paid service or subscription that requires the user to act in order to avoid any misleading charges.
MySpac
e CEO Own Van Natta has identified these “opt-out” offers as misleading and made a change to the terms of Use in order to clarify what is acceptable for both users and developers.
Facebook also made an announcement that they have joined in the fight to eradicate this type of scamming advertisements. In fact if you check their blog, you will see that they have disabled two complete ad networks because of this and that Facebook have addressed ad-related violations in over a hundred applications.
