The IT Nerd

Facebook users should take note. A recent report by Symantec says that your personal info might have been leaked to third parties. How is this happening? Well, there’s an app for that. Actually there’s about 100, 000 apps for that:

Symantec has discovered that in certain cases, Facebook IFRAME applications inadvertently leaked access tokens to third parties like advertisers or analytic platforms. We estimate that as of April 2011, close to 100,000 applications were enabling this leakage. We estimate that over the years, hundreds of thousands of applications may have inadvertently leaked millions of access tokens to third parties.

Well, that’s going to keep you awake at night. But you shouldn’t be shocked. After all, Facebook has proven time and again hasn’t had the best record when it comes to privacy. But back to the issue at hand. What do you do to stop your personal info from leaking? Here’s what Symantec recommends:

There is no good way to estimate how many access tokens have already been leaked since the release Facebook applications back in 2007. We fear a lot of these tokens might still be available in log files of third-party servers or still being actively used by advertisers. Concerned Facebook users can change their Facebook passwords to invalidate leaked access tokens. Changing the password invalidates these tokens and is equivalent to “changing the lock” on your Facebook profile.

I’m going to guess that there’s a lot of people changing passwords over the next few days.

I really wish that Facebook would get their act together when it comes to privacy.

This entry was posted on May 12, 2011 at 8:03 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Facebook, Privacy, Symantec. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.