Jefferson's Wheel

The Examiner has an article on Facebook privacy issues: To Facebook or not to Facebook, 29 June 2009.

The second approach is even scarier, a feature of Facebook which allows outside developers to create small programs called “applications” for members to do things like playing poker, getting daily horoscopes, and sending each other virtual fantasies. With the younger set, the latter must cause parents a lot of consternation over their kids. Word is there are about 24,000 applications that have been built by 400,000 developers.

And here’s the kicker. Once these developers have your personal data, there is nothing Facebook can do. Adrienne Felt of the University of Virginia investigated the procedure in her thesis and found out that 90 out of 150 of Facebook’s most popular applications (that’s 60 percent) have unnecessary access to your private information.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 4th, 2009 at 10:34 am and is filed under Privacy, Research, Social Networks.