Software & Apps

A Wall Street Journal article published today has some pretty serious news for Facebook users:

Many of the most 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…

Wall Street Journal reporters, who investigated a number of popular apps, say that this issue “affects tens of millions of Facebook app users, including people who set their profiles to Facebook’s strictest privacy settings.”

Apps users allow to access their profiles get access to a “Facebook ID,” a unique ID attributed to each user. But since this ID is a public part of the user’s profile, anyone can connect the ID to the user, and thereby obtain information about them, “even if that person has set all of his or her Facebook information to be private.”

The article gives a number of examples of apps that have collected such information and passed it onto third-party advertising and tracking companies, or includes it in cookies, that are accessible to other companies.

It’s not clear how common this is, or which apps are harvesting this information, but Facebook users should be very careful about allowing apps to access their personal information.