Kashmir Hill writes about the WSJ piece revealing a Facebook privacy “breach:” … Using “breach” to describe this strikes me as overwrought. The applications reveal your name, that you are on Facebook, and possibly which application(s) you’ve downloaded. Is that something that we should be freaking out about? A host of experts debated the issue…
Category: Breaches
LOLApps Back On Facebook After UID Issues
Alexia Tsotsis reports: This weekend Facebook shut down some applications that were found by the WSJ to have been sharing Facebook User IDs (a unique profile identifier Facebook uses in its APIs) to independent ad networks and internet tracking services such as RapLeaf. According to the Journal, these UID transferal issues were the primary reason Facebook took down apps run…
Facebook in hot water with Germany again
German ministers criticised social networking site Facebook on Sunday for failing to respect privacy, following a report of a serious flaw that allowed non-subscribers access to private data. German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine reported that a glitch potentially allowed anyone access to the contact lists of subscribers. New subscribers to Facebook are required to enter their…
Reply, not Reply All: Friday edition
The graduate dean at the University of Missouri at Columbia mistakenly sent to a listserv for graduate students this week an e-mail reply that referred to what he perceived as a student’s “mental distress,” forcing him to follow up Thursday with a broad apology for the privacy breach. In the e-mail apologizing to Missouri’s grad…