As Web sites come and go, so too could the information you entrust them with

View Photo Gallery —  In seven years, the social networking site has grown from a project hatched in a college dorm to the largest social networking site in the world, well on its way to hitting its goal of having 1 billion users.

That policy says users have the right to request that images not go to another company.

But there are no standard privacy rules for Web sites, federal enforcement officials say, and consumers encounter many practices.

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Friendster e-mailed users about its planned changes and suggested ways for them to download their data. The company, owned by the Malaysian firm MOL, said it won’t delete customer databases.

Google also told users that it would shut down Buzz and that it doesn’t plan to delete information in those accounts.

Consumers might find even bigger surprises when an entire business fails. Bookseller Borders this year auctioned off its customer database, including purchase history, in bankruptcy court. Information about users on the defunct gay youth Web site XY were put up for sale, too, until the Federal Trade Commission stepped in to prevent the sale.

Federal enforcement officials are stepping up efforts to protect online privacy as change comes fast.

“There is no general legal requirement for companies to get rid of information,” said Christopher N. Olsen, the FTC’s assistant director of privacy and identity protection. It recently charged Facebook with failing to delete past users’ data, even though it said it had.

“There have been more and more issues that require our attention,” he said.

That all comes as news to Rashida Isigi, 34, a New York-based corporate recruiter who understands the risks involved in her online activity.

She surprised herself recently when tracing back her online history by counting the various sites she’s joined. Isigi didn’t realize she was littering the Internet with so many pieces of personal information.

She’s had several e-mail accounts, through AOL, Hotmail, Gmail, the University of Arizona and eight corporate addresses. She’s on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and HootSuite — which lets her post comments to several social-media sites at once.

Most of the accounts have been idle for years, but she hasn’t shut them down or deleted her information. She said she accepts that there’s a price to pay for using the services.

She checks her Hotmail account once a month just to clean out the mailbox. And she rarely thinks about her MySpace profile, created during her late 20s.

“At some point, you just have to surrender control,” she said.

 
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