Top Facebook Apps Violate Privacy Terms

cgriffin21 writes "No stranger to privacy concerns, Facebook is once again in the privacy spotlight, following a Wall Street Journal report that some popular Facebook applications leak personal information to advertisers. 'Many of the popular applications, or 'apps,' on the social-networking site Facebook Inc. have been transmitting identifying information — in effect, providing access to people's names and, in some cases, their friends' names — to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies,' according to The Wall Street Journal, which wrote about Facebook Sunday in the latest installment of its recent 'What They Know' series about advertising and the Internet."

Looks just like referrer passing

[sinclair44]

From my interpretation of TFA, it just looks like some apps were accidentally passing a referrer containing the user's Facebook ID.

"Recently, it has come to our attention that several applications built on Facebook Platform were passing the User ID (UID), an identifier that we use within our APIs, in a manner that violated this policy," Vernal wrote. "In most cases, developers did not intend to pass the information, but did so because of the technical details of how the browsers work."

"Press reports have exaggerated the implication of sharing at UID [user ID]. Knowledge of a UID does not enable anyone to access private user information without explicit user consent. Nevertheless, we are committed to ensuring that even the inadvertent passing of UIDs is prevented and all applications are in compliance with our policy."

Re:facebook is the end of privacy as we know it...

[Goffee71]

Facebook isn't in the privacy business, its in the business business and until told to stop it, in court, via a socking great fine, it will carry on regardless.

Murdoch Own's both WSJ and Myspace

[Anonymous Coward]

It's good to understand the power structure and who is reporting on who.

Re:Facebook needs a default block

[darkstar949]

You need to do this for each app that spams the wall, but when you put your mouse over the message an X will appear. Clicking will give you a couple options like "Hide [User]", "Mark as Spam", and "Hide Messages from [App]." When you hide the messages from the app, you will hide all messages across everyone on your friend list. Given that certain apps tend to be the most popular and played by more than one person, it shouldn't be too hard to hide the majority of the messages.

Really? (sarcasm)

[smbarbour]

You mean Zynga actually is the money hungry whore everyone thought it was?

Overhyped BS

[Is0m0rph]

This a passing of a user ID only. If that user has setup their profile correctly nothing can be gained from that user ID. It's no different than typing a random name in the search and going to the returned user's pages.