After numerous waves of social-networks privacy issues, decision makers in Washington also began to raise an eyebrow or two concerning the hundreds of millions of individuals-numbering internet giants. Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee Sen. Jay Rockefeller sent an inquiring letter to Mark Zuckerberg and MySpace president Michael Jones.

“The senator said he aimed to learn whether the sites “are adequately protecting their users’ personal information”…The letter follows a similar letter last week to Facebook from Reps. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Joe Barton, R-Texas. The two men are co-chairmen of the House Bipartisan Privacy Caucus”

In the letter to Zuckerberg Sen. Rockefeller targeted Facebook’s practical enforcement of its seemingly protective privacy policies and inquired about the number of people assigned to monitor applications and execute penalties for violations. In his letter to Michael Jones however, he supposedly asked about MySpace’s outwardly less protective privacy policy in comparison to other social networks.

With their hundreds of millions of users on the line, Facebook and MySpace even had a prospect of preparing themselves to one sort or another of a political clobber. Sen. Rockefeller’s snail mail examination this Tuesday most definitely didn’t pop out of the blue, which may even add some significance to FB‘s announcement last week regarding an encryption of transmitted user IDs.

The additional probes come days after a Congressional questioning of Mark Zuckerberg’s knowledge of data leaking at Facebook.  The Wall Street Journal has been on a specialized mission to alert consumers of privacy setbacks taking place across the social web lately, while popular Facebook app makers like Zynga are facing time in court for breaching users’ privacy.