Facebook Dogged By New Privacy Breech

By Alicia Cruz

The Black Urban Times

Social networking mogul, Facebook is being dogged by new a privacy controversy after an article by The Wall Street Journal disclosed a breech by popular applications such as Farmville and Mafia Wars, Sunday.

The article warned that at least 10 applications were illegally "providing access to people’s names and, in some cases, their friends’ names” to advertisers and web tracking companies.

While Facebook engineer, Mike Vernal downplayed the breech in a blog post saying, "Press reports have exaggerated the implications of sharing a user ID," he did acknowledge that the sharing of user data in any way is in violation of the site's privacy policies.

In that post, Vernal wrote that Facebook learned the information some applications were allegedly passing on are a set of unique numbers assigned to each Facebook member that is used to identify the user, and added that while "knowledge of a UID does not enable anyone to access private user information without explicit user consent," Facebook took steps to resolve the violation by disabling some of the programs.

The latest privacy breech isn't the first Facebook has had to deal with. In May, after a series of complaints from some users and privacy advocates, the company made changes to its privacy settings, and apologized to users Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg told The New York Times.