Codebreaker

Facebook user data sold

John Moe Nov 1, 2010

On Friday, Facebook posted on their developers’ blog updating their most recent privacy breach – the one in which the company was sharing user IDs with third parties. The update included this sentence:

As we examined the circumstances of inadvertent UID transfers, we discovered some instances where a data broker was paying developers for UIDs.

Facebook has put these third parties on a six-month suspension, and while Facebook won’t say who it suspended, it says those parties number fewer than a dozen. RapLeaf Inc., one of the companies that has all kinds of personal information about you, “came forward to work with [Facebook] on this situation.” RapLeaf is going to delete all Facebook User IDs from its huge database and won’t “conduct any Facebook activities on the platform” in the future.

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