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morning talker time. can t get the old-school light bulbs at least at ikea. the retailer is phasing them out. they re the first major retailer to do it. the government phaseout begins next year. only compact fluorescent bulbs and other-savers will be on sale at ikea from now on. incredible. some people prefer the old bulb because of the light it puts off. interesting. it is the most popular game on facebook ever. 84 million users played citiville last month, breaking the previous record held by farmville. in case you re not familiar, and i m not. in cityville, people business a city full of businesses and infrastructure. the game encourages use force build connections with facebook friends users to build connections with facebook friends. every now and then people say, i did this on farmville, what that means but way to go. and the productivity in the workplace is at an all-time low. may be connected. your new year s resolution may be to lose weight, but for one man it ....
reporter: anyone who uses an application. half a billion facebook users, and 70 percent use apps so we are talking potential of hundreds of millions of people having basic information mined. that includes 5 million on farmville, 39 million on frontierville and 36 million play hex texas hold em. they are transmitting personal information to firms that could have a profile of you or people like you and your online activity. the wall street journal says when you sign up for the games or applications, you lose control of at least some of your personal information. shepard: how is facebook responding? guest: they are taking steps to dramatically limit users exposure and say press reports have exaggerated the implication of sharing. and one data mining company said we didn t do it on purpose. ....
Has become an obsession. right here is my plants which are ready to be harvested. reporter: she works part-time and has two children but still manages to get on farmville, where she can even sell her crops to friends online. i go on at least twice a day. definitely more than three times a day. i d say, like, five. she ll like go on first when i come home, then she ll be like, oh, caitlin, can you get off a second to i can go on? reporter: it s the first time maria has ever played a social game. at age 49 she represents a growing demographic. the average social gamer isn t a young male huddled in the family den, but rather, a 43-year-old woman who increasingly can move from obsession to addiction. they have tried to stop, they couldn t. they ve tried to put time limits on their farmville use but they couldn t. reporter: that was marianne thomas life. i did feel like i was addicted to farmville. i d play it in the morning, in the evenings, all during the day. i gained pr ....
Weekend playing with my kids when, in fact, she was playing on farmville. same deal as far as losing a job or getting a job. they re looking at those pictures. and we ve heard of cases where this has played out. i also want to get to something that a lot of parents are concerned about. kids possibly falling to prey of, you know, predators, anyone that wants to take advantage of them. right. this is a parent s worst nightmare. it is something we re hearing more and more about. in the uk, they just instituted what they re calling a panic button. facebook has to have this online panic button. if they feel they re getting unwanted attention from a stranger or if they re getting cyber bullied from friends, they push the button, it reports it to facebook and facebook can alert the authorities or take action. that s not here in the states yet. no. there doesn t seem to be any movement to get that in the states. now there s been a lot in the news about cyber bullying and about child pr ....