Facebook admits to ‘privacy breach’ by its popular apps
October 18th, 2010 - 8:08 pm ICT by Aishwarya Bhatt
Palo Alto, Oct 18 (THAINDIAN NEWS) The social networking site Facebook has been plagued by privacy issues in the recent past and there seems to be no respite for the company. On Sunday the company confessed in a candid manner that there had been another privacy breach, which has already directly or indirectly affected millions of users.
The privacy breach was raked up by an independent investigation of the Wall Street Journal. After the results of the investigation came in, then the red faced company was forced to admit that many apps had been responsible for the privacy breach, as they had been leaking the user ids to numerous advertising and Internet tracking organizations. One of the most popular app on Facebook is the Farmville game and that was also responsible for the leak.
Facebook officials admitted that they discovered the issue very recently. They addressed the concern on their developers’ blog, where they said that, “In most cases, developers did not intend to pass this information, but did so because of the technical details of how browsers work”. They also added that they were totally unaware of the breach till now. It may be recalled that in the past Facebook had called the curtains on ‘LOLappa Media’, which was one of the participants in the privacy breach.
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Tags: apps, candid manner, curtains, developers, facebook, game, independent investigation, palo alto, participants, privacy breach, privacy issues, respite, social networking site, technical details, wall street, wall street journal