Facebook games maker sued in privacy flap A developer of some of Facebook's most popular games has been hit by a federal lawsuit alleging it shared millions of Facebook user IDs with advertisers and data brokers. The lawsuit alleges that Zynga, maker of six of the top 10 Facebook games, collected and shared the IDs of 218 million users, in violation of federal law and …
Just like the "Dot-Com" bomb proved that there was no money to be made by just putting up a web site, these series of scandals are testament that there is no money in the "open and free" model of 'Web 2.0"--except, that is, by being unscrupulous and sneaky with user's personal information.
The whole "the web must remain free" and all these free apps and services that everybody's touting as the egalitarian revolution of communication and social interaction is merely a façade by greedy corporations to capitalize on users' naïvete and make a buck by selling their personal details around.
Sure, it shows that there is a great demand for social and interpersonal interaction from the masses, but we've known this, and it has been the case for ever. The difference now is that, before it was always understood that social clubs and entertainment services cannot be sustained without substantial resources, and that most people are not willing to pay for it. Somehow people willfully ignore this.
-dZ.
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I have my profile all set to friends only, turned off external search indexing etc. However as the wife made me do Farmville so she could get gifts I will have had my ID shared.
This may or may not do much due to my privacy settings (I'd have to try an API call) none the less this personal and identifying bit of data has been shared with a 3rd party breaking the Facebook and Zynga privacy policy at the very least.
I've regularly been told than an app using one of my former profile pics was claiming me as a happy user of whatever shit service or product they were peddling. So it's defnitely not the first nor will it be the last. FB solely exists to scrape and scrape and scrape as this Zynga thing proves entirely, Zuckerburg probably knows and is even more likely to be skimming a layer off the top, how else do you pay for global datacentres?
Glad I'm rid of the fscking thing now, I shall rue the day I was foolish enough to have been zuckered in for a long time to come!
I play several of the games listed in the article. Not much bothered about the info sharing, I think I have a reasonably clean profile, and other than by exact birth date, nothing I want to protect there. But over the last two days I've friended some people who don't play the games, yet their names show up when I pull up the list of people who are supposed to be "neighbors" in the game. I don't think they play because when I look at their walls, there are no game entrails on the wall. Oddly enough, I think they both also have iPhones they use for FB.
Shock!! A company that makes Facebook apps takes personal data and sells it!
Seriously - didn't everyone expect this to happen? You give access to your profile when you install an FB applet and you expect them not to reap every bit of data and sow it in the marketing world?
The only word I can say if you really believed this is 'dumbass'.
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