Facebook Leaks Identifying Information

Be fair, attentive, and customers
will return.

Many popular applications, apps, on the
social networking site Facebook Inc. have
been leaking identifying information like:
access to people's names, their friends'
names, to dozens of advertising and Internet
tracking companies, per a Wall Street Journal
investigation.

This wrinkle spreads to millions of Facebook
app users, even those whose profiles are on
Facebook's strictest privacy settings.

"A Facebook user ID may be inadvertently shared
by a user's Internet browser or by an application,"
Facebook's spokesman explained. ID knowledge "does
not permit access to anyone's private information
on Facebook." He added that Facebook would introduce
new technology to contain the problem identified
by the Journal.

"Apps" are software pieces that let Facebook's 500
million users play games/share common interests with
each other. The Journal discovered all of the 10 most
popular apps on Facebook were leaking users' IDs to
outside companies.

Most apps were no longer available to Facebook users
after the Journal told Facebook that apps were leaking
personal information. No reason was given for their
unavailability. Online defenders of tracking point to
the observation as beneficial.

No one knows, for sure, if developers of many of the
apps leaking Facebook ID numbers knew that their apps
were doing so. The apps were using a common Web standard,
known as a referrer, which passes on the address of the
last page viewed when a user clicks on a link. Facebook
as with other social networking sites, referrers can
expose a user's identity.

It's a ballooning concern of companies that store
detailed databases on people to track them online.