Facebook Sends Your Info To Marketers….. WTF?
If I didn’t want to get a Facebook account before, I sure don’t want one now. Apparently if you use Facebook apps like Farmville, your personal info is going straight to marketing companies:
According to The Wall Street Journal, some of the highlighted apps have been suspended. However, some of the biggest names, including the wildly popular FarmVille, are still running. Farmville, designed by Zynga Game Network Inc., was also found to be distributing personal information about its users’ friends, meaning information may have been disclosed about users who never played the game.
Charming. Facebook had this to say about this latest privacy issue:
In a Facebook blog post, company engineer Mike Vernal said the social network’s rules clearly say: “Developers cannot disclose user information to ad networks and data brokers. We take strong measures to enforce this policy, including suspending and disabling applications that violate it.”
Mr. Vernal said the media have “exaggerated the implications” of the leaks, because mostly they involve only identification numbers that Facebook attaches to users. If users restrict outside access to their information, the identity or so-called UID numbers would yield only names. If users do not restrict access to their Facebook information, advertisers and web trackers could get information on friends, schools, employers, birthdates and other personal details.
“We are committed to ensuring that even the inadvertent passing of UIDs is prevented and all applications are in compliance with our policy,” Mr. Vernal said.
Sure you are. That’s why this issue keeps coming up. If Facebook were serious about privacy, they would make sure that they had iron clad privacy. But they don’t because they’re not serious about it. Privacy for them is like playing a game of Whack A Mole. You plug one hole and another issue pops up someplace else. Now the Privacy Commissioner of Canada is toying with the idea of investigating them…. Again, and that might make them behave better. But I say the only way to send a clear message to Facebook is to stop using them. After all, if you can’t trust them, why use them?
Right now, nobody should trust them.
November 14, 2010 at 11:18 pm
Yes… charming indeed. Just when I was about to think “good thing I don’t use Facebook to play games and use it for what it was meant for in the first place” I read “was also found to be distributing personal information about its users’ friends, meaning information may have been disclosed about users who never played the game.”
Aw crap.