- November 1st, 2010 by Ryan Denker
Facebook is just a Pandora’s Box of security and privacy issues these days. A few weeks ago, a number of users banded together to boycott the social networking service with mass exodus, but it didn’t seem to make a dent in Facebook’s bottom line. Then Facebook changed its privacy settings and that caused another uproar. Now Facebook is saying that it has suspended developers for violating its rules after the devs sold user identification numbers do data brokers. Oops.
However, it doesn’t seem like anyone’s private data was compromised, according to InformationWeek:
The company said that no private user data had been sold — Facebook does not consider UIDs to be private even though they can be used to track individual users — and it said that the UIDs transferred were not used to access private data.
The social network also says it has “never sold and will never sell user information.”
Of course, there is no real reason to get paranoid. You should already know that the minute you sign up for Facebook, add friends and post pictures and status updates, you’ve basically given up all your privacy. Or a good chunk of it, anyway. Now we know that if it isn’t Mark Zuckerberg & Co. drawing thin lines and coloring in gray areas, it’s developers who are engaging in shady practices.
You can bet we’re not giving up our accounts and our Xenohub fan page is still going to stay up, full force.
[Via InformationWeek]
