14 DAY TRIAL // Several of Facebook's most popular applications, including the social game phenomenon which is FarmVille, are being accused of breaking the privacy rules of the social network by sending their users' personal information to ad companies.
Facebook, even though it is the biggest social network in the world, is taking some serious heat from its confusing and inadequate privacy settings, but has recently revealed that it is trying to fix all of these issues.
Meanwhile, developers of Facebook applications and games, like Zynga, are making huge amounts of profit through titles like FarmVille, FrontierVille or Mafia Wars.
According to a new report from the Wall Street Journal, it seems that Zynga wasn't exactly looking out for the privacy of the people who play its titles, and was supplying ad companies with personal information about their users, even those who set their profile to be extremely private and secure.
"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," revealed the Wall Street Journal's investigation.
According to the prestigious newspaper, many such applications were supplying ad companies with the unique Facebook ID of their users, allowing them to access these profiles even if their owners set the most strict privacy settings.
"The apps reviewed by the Journal were sending Facebook ID numbers to at least 25 advertising and data firms, several of which build profiles of Internet users by tracking their online activities."
While many ad companies defended their practice by saying that they didn't harvest any private information, some admitted that they used some of the data from those profiles to target specific ads to those people.
This will no doubt make quite a few Facebook users be more careful when using applications for the service and even quit the social network altogether.