In a Wall Street Journal post, it has tagged three of Zynga’s top games among the list of WSJ’s most used Facebook apps. According to the study, these apps were sending your identifying information to various ad firms and internet tracking companies. The three games are Farmville, Frontierville and Texas HoldEm Poker. In the WSJ post, it stated that these games are sending the unique Facebook ID number assigned to each user who’s subscribed to Facebook.
The post didn’t just exactly focus on these three games. The study ranked the top 10 apps and these 10 apps were all sending user’s IDs to outside companies. In fact, from the top 10, there are three Facebook apps (which includes Farmville) are also sending information about their friends.
This just goes to show that if you really want your privacy, it’s better off going off the grid (which means stop using Facebook or any other social network). Or if you can’t really delete your Facebook account, then you’d better set your privacy settings to at least safeguard the information that you have on your profile.
Just to be clear on what is being sent, the information these apps are only sending your Facebook ID. They don’t have access on the things that are under your “privacy setting” umbrella.
Facebook has in fact suspended some app’s operation when WSJ presented their findings to the company. According to a Facebook official, they’ll be making the necessary actions to contain the problem the finding has presented.
