Social Networking giant Facebook is under fire for allowing third party app developers to collect and share users’ personal data. The news comes from a Wall Street Journal report that discovered the unique Facebook ID which serves to identify each user was being collected and shared with 25 advertising and marketing firms. Even more alarming is the fact that the offenders are major money makers for Facebook and are amongst the top downloaded and played apps; Zynga being one of them. Facebook has since shut down the offending content developers, with the exception of Zynga. Although they are the largest firm found to be in violation of Facebook's privacy policy they have not been shutdown. It would seem that privacy issues are secondary to revenue stream. The world may just grind to a halt if people couldn't feed their virtual animals.
The unique ID that is being collected and shared allows marketing firms to connect this ID with the users name and contact information regardless of their privacy settings. The value of this information far outweighs the consequences of violating the privacy policies. Firms will use this information to track habits and behaviours, enabling more accurate marketing of products and services. While this may seem fairly inoffensive, it raises some very serious concerns about the control we have over our personal information. Hopefully this will serve to raise awareness of privacy issues and force the government to create tougher laws to deal with non-compliant companies.
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