Your private info may not be as private as you thought
NEW YORK – The latest Facebook privacy fiasco shows that the world’s largest online social hub is having a hard time putting this thorny issue behind it even as it continues to attract users and become indispensible to many of them.
The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that several popular Facebook applications have been transmitting users’ personal identifying information to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies. Facebook said it is working to fix the problem, and was quick to point out that the leaks were not intentional, but a consequence of basic Web mechanisms.
“In most cases, developers did not intend to pass this information, but did so because of the technical details of how browsers work,” said Mike Vernal, a Facebook engineer, in a blog post Monday.
Facebook defends site
In a statement, Facebook said there is “no evidence that any personal information was misused or even collected as a result of this issue.”
Even so, some privacy advocates said it’s problematic that the information was leaked at all, regardless of what happened to it. Facebook needs its users to trust it with their data because if they don’t, they won’t use the site to share as much as they do now.
“Facebook has been assuring users for a very long time that their personal information will not be available to advertisers,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center.
How data is shared
Facebook’s more than 500 million users share varying amounts of private information online, and over the years the company has come under fire from privacy advocates for pushing people to reveal more about themselves to everyone on the Internet. At the same time, the company also allows users to set up privacy settings for nearly everything they share on the site.
There are some exceptions, though. Users’ names, profile photo and gender if they specify it are always public. For a slew of other details, Facebook gives users controls so that they can hide friends list, photos, work information and e-mail addresses.
More safeguards wanted
Facebook said the knowledge of a user’s ID does not give anyone access to that user’s private information. But that’s not the problem, said Peter Eckersley, senior staff technologist for the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation.
“The problem is that ad companies can know who you are at all,” he said.
Eckersley said the “referer” problem isn’t new, nor is it necessarily limited to Facebook. The Journal did not mention other social networks such as MySpace, which is owned by News Corp., like the Journal.
“We urgently need investigations to determine how many other social networks may be suffering from this type of data leak,” he said.
A MySpace representative did not immediately return a message for comment Monday afternoon.
Some, such as media critic Jeff Jarvis, came to Facebook’s defense, calling the Journal report an overreaction since the user information was already publicly available.
“The White Pages reveal I use the phone. So?” Jarvis wrote on Twitter.