Understanding the latest Facebook privacy train wreck

Facebook’s latest privacy problem should raise a few eyebrows. Facebook sharing “private” data in unexpected (and occasionally unwelcome) ways is nothing new, but this newest problem is unusual, in that it does something that Facebook’s lengthy (and oft-updated) privacy policy explicitly says should not happen: it shares private user information with advertisers.

The research originally describing the problem looked at more than just Facebook. Many social networking sites, including LinkedIn, Digg, and Twitter, suffered the same leakage of personal data. Of the twelve sites looked at by the researchers, the only one that didn’t leak data to advertisers was the one already owned by an advertising company—Orkut.

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