By Bill Pytlovany
Are you one of the 350 million Facebook users? I’m a big fan of Facebook and like many I connect daily to see what my friends are doing and to share photos. As a security professional I am very careful about what I post and what information I allow to be shared. In that respect I’m unique. It surprises me how many of my friends will refuse to allow companies to share their information but eagerly give away their personal information to application developers on Facebook.
My friend Diana sent me some Christmas cheer. How could that be a bad thing right? Well, if I accept her cheer I’m sharing my personal information and all my friends with a company called Mob Science who has no physical address or privacy policy posted on their website.
Who are these application developers you’re giving your personal information too. One of the most popular developers is San Francisco based Zynga. They’re responsible for the games Farmville, YoVille, Mafia Wars, RollerCoaster Kingdom, Scrabble and dozens more. You’ll never be offered a chance to read Zynga’s privacy policy but the information is typical. They say only your name, address and gender are collected. As in most privacy policies they protect themselves with vague statements like “we don’t generally collect any “Personally Identifying Information” about our users”.
I’m not saying the folks at Zynga are evil or have bad intent but I doubt most users realize they’re providing information to this or other little known companies. Most people mistakenly believe it’s just all part of the Facebook experience.
This post is excerpted with Bill’s permission from his blog
