In today’s Quick Hits, we talk about Etsy’s privacy blunder, Twitter’s impressive growth, and cyberbullying among very young Internet users.

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Twitter Processes One Billion Tweets Per Week

Twitter celebrates its fifth anniversary this month, and the company looks vastly different than it did five years ago. According to new stats, Twitter processes a whopping one billion tweets per week. It took Twitter three years to get to one billion tweets total. Interestingly, it appears that Twitter can grow even further. A Pew research study showed that only 8% of Americans use Twitter, leaving lots of room for new users to try out the service.

Etsy Privacy Snafu Angers Customers

The shopping website Etsy is widely admired for giving shoppers a place to find unique hand-crafted goods online. However, the company’s reputation took a big hit recently after it released a new feature that showed what users had purchased. According to Ars Technica, “The controversy began last week when Etsy flipped the switch on People Search as part of its effort to make Etsy feel more like a social network…Even if users haven’t entered their full names, their profiles are still searchable by username. Even better, people’s Etsy profiles and their purchase histories (via the feedback they leave) are beginning to show up under Google results for their names.”

Worse yet, Etsy didn’t notify users before making this change, meaning people had no opportunity to opt out of the feature. Now, some users’ private purchases are being tied to their Google identities, and it’s having a detrimental effect on their online reputations. Etsy has since addressed the issue, but the temporary snafu is a timely example of how privacy and reputation are inexorably linked.

Teen Receives Thousands of RSVPs to Birthday Party on Facebook

An Australian teen, who mistakenly set up a public event instead of a private event, was shocked to find that over 200,000 people had RSVP’d to her sweet sixteen birthday party. Although the girl made the mistake of leaving the event open, police were investigating a 17-year-old in relation to the incident. Presumably, the high numbers came as part of an Internet prank. Interestingly, the girl set up a second event, and still kept it open. Over 70,000 people have RSVP’d to the second invitation.

Seven-Year-Old Cyberbullying Victims

According to new UK studies, many children as young as seven “have their own Facebook pages and some are being cyber-bullied.” Researchers partly attribute the low age of bullying victims to lax parenting. Most social networking websites prohibit anyone under 13 from having a profile and experts recommend respecting those age limits.

FTC Settles With Online Advertiser Over Opt-Outs

According to the Washington Post’s Cecilia Kang, “the Federal Trade Commission said Monday that it settled with online advertising provider Chitika for allegedly tracking online activities of users who had opted out of the company’s service.” The FTC was investigating Chitika over complains that “the company allegedly placed cookies on the Web browsers of consumers who had explicitly asked to bar the tracking service from collecting information to be used for behavioral advertising.” The FTC’s investigation into Chitika demonstrates the possible shortfalls of a self-regulated system among Internet advertisers.