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Top-Ranked Facebook Applications Transmit Personal IDs, Personal Information To Ad Firms

Facebook’s privacy rules aren’t as watertight as the company would have its users believe, after the Wall Street Journal uncovered that some of the social network’s most popular apps have siphoned off personal information to ad firms and internet tracking outfits.

According to the report, many Facebook apps have transmitted identifiable details about individual users to around 25 companies, in effect breaking the terms laid down by the Mark Zuckerberg-run website.

The privacy breach, which gives advertising and internet tracking firms access to people’s names, affects a huge number of Facebook app users. Worse still, the newspaper found that users whose profiles have rigorous privacy settings have also had their details exposed. It said that the 10 most popular Facebook apps, including Farmville and Texas HoldEm Poker, were transmitting users’ IDs to external firms.

Game Network Inc’s Farmville was found to also be transmitting personal details about a user’s Facebook “friends” to advertisers and internet tracking companies.

Facebook, which claims to have around 500 million users of its service, told the WSJ that the social network would bring in new tech to close the breach.

One company, RapLeaf Inc, was found to have linked Facebook ID details taken from apps to its own database of internet users, which it sells on to companies. RapLeaf insisted that the transmission of data hadn’t been intentional. “We didn’t do it on purpose,” the company’s biz development veep Joel Jewitt told the newspaper.

The company put out a separate statement at http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/418 to its third-party developers that was part finger-wagging, and partly an assertion that the press had exaggerated the implications of sharing a UID.

Credit: The Register

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