Facebook, already plagued by privacy violation scandals this year, is facing a new challenge this week - the Wall Street Journal has found that all of the top ten Facebook apps were transmitting Facebook user ID’s, propitiatory numbers that allow access any public information available in a user’s profile. Three of those top ten were also found to be transmitting user’s friend’s information to outside companies, including the uber-popular Farmville.
The apps reviewed by the Journal were found to be transmitting Facebook ID numbers to more than 25 advertising and data firms, some of which construct profiles of Internet users by tracking their online activities. This kind of data mining is meant to be anonymous, but at least one of the data-gathering firms, RapLeaf Inc., was found to have linked Facebook user ID information to its own, non-anonymous database of internet users, which it sells.
RapLeaf claims that it wasn’t inappropriately sharing people’s information on purpose, and in fact the apps transmitting the data from Facebook may not be doing it intentionally either. The apps were using a common Web standard, a “referrer,” which passes on the address of the last page viewed when a user clicks on a link. Referrers used in conjunction with social networking sites like Facebook can pass along user identities.
Inadvertent or not, it is against Facebook’s privacy policies to pass on this kind of information. In fact, it’s also against the privacy policies of most of the apps that passed on this information. Facebook seems to have shut down access to the apps in question until they can handle this new security challenge. If you haven’t already made sure that you, and your children, have carefully maintained privacy settings on Facebook, take a moment today to check.
