More and more people are searching for their own names online, a study has shown.

With 2007 shaping up to be remembered as the year of the social network, 47 percent of internet users have searched for their own name online, research from the Pew Internet Project discovered. This compared to 22 percent who had done this in 2002.

What's more, 53 per cent of people said that they have looked up information about personal and business contacts online.
"The cumulative traces of our online activity are more visible in the age of Web 2.0," explained Mary Madden, a co-author of the report.

"The more content we voluntarily contribute to the public or semi-public corners of the web, the more we become not only findable, but knowable."

Indeed, while 60 percent of internet users said that they were not worried about how much information is available about them online, only 38 percent revealed that they had already taken steps to limit the amount of online information about them on the web.

Worryingly, around a third of internet users thought that their email address, home address, home phone number or their employer names were freely available to anyone online.

All this information online is leading hackers and other cyber criminals to increasingly target social network sites to harvest data.

A report from the Canadian Press recently claimed that an Ontario-based company which specializes in online pornography is being sued by the popular social network site Facebook over allegations that it hacked the website's computers and tried to access the personal information of users.

The company, which does business under the name SlickCash, was named in an amended complaint filed by Facebook in San Jose.

According to the complaint, the company attempted to access Facebook's servers at least 200,000 times during a two-week period in June last year.

"Each of these requests sought to direct Facebook's computers to send information on other Facebook users back to (the company's internet protocol) address," the court documents reportedly state.

"These requests for information from Facebook generated error messages and were detected as unauthorized attempts to access and harvest proprietary information."

The complaint did not make it clear what information was accessed, but claimed that "the defendants knowingly and without permission took, copied, or made use of, data from Facebook's proprietary computers and computer network".

While in this case Facebook was suing another company for trying to use information about its users, the social networking site itself was recently forced to apologize for how it made use of members' data.

In early December, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the website had "made a lot of mistakes" with its new advertising system, which was called Beacon.

The system was supposed to allow users to promote products which they had purchased via their profile. However, people were concerned that it was too hard to opt of the project.

On the Facebook blog, Zuckerberg wrote: "When we first thought of Beacon, our goal was to build a simple product to let people share information across sites with their friends.

But we missed the right balance … The problem with our initial approach of making it an opt-out system instead of opt-in was that if someone forgot to decline to share something, Beacon still went ahead and shared it with their friends.

"Facebook has succeeded so far in part because it gives people control over what and how they share information."

As a result, Zuckerberg announced the system could now be turned off by users and that the social network site would no longer "store those actions even when partners send them to Facebook".

Despite these concerns about the availability of data as a result of Web 2.0, the Pew Internet & American Life Project did show that easily-accessible online information could be a good thing.

Around half of adults told the study that they had searched online for more information about friends and family to bring them closer.

"Nostalgia seems to motivate quite a few internet users. The most popular search target is someone from the past - an old friend, an old flame, or a former colleague," Susannah Fox, a co-author of the report.

"These findings provide powerful evidence of the internet's capacity to reunite and reignite social connections."