FarmVille Leaks Facebook User Data to the Internet

[Andy Chalk]

I guess I just think you guys should be more on the side of "this is not a big deal, since we routinely give away such numbers" instead of the side of "this is hacking-style data mining". I mean, read these comments with all the clueless people yelling about privacy and how evil Zinga is.

The leak itself may not be a big deal in terms of how much privacy is surrendered online every day, but I think the widespread breakdown of Facebook's policy is. From a personal perspective, I think it's rather foolish to spread details of your life all over a social network and then expect some kind of iron-clad guarantee of "privacy," and I doubt very much that most Facebook users give a shit one way or the other anyway. But if a corporation, Facebook or otherwise, lays down policies on paper, then it's not unreasonable to expect them to be followed. In this case, that wasn't happening, and not just in one or two isolated cases, but across a huge swath of apps involving tens of millions of users.

 

[ark123]

I guess I just think you guys should be more on the side of "this is not a big deal, since we routinely give away such numbers" instead of the side of "this is hacking-style data mining". I mean, read these comments with all the clueless people yelling about privacy and how evil Zinga is.

The leak itself may not be a big deal in terms of how much privacy is surrendered online every day, but I think the widespread breakdown of Facebook's policy is. From a personal perspective, I think it's rather foolish to spread details of your life all over a social network and then expect some kind of iron-clad guarantee of "privacy," and I doubt very much that most Facebook users give a shit one way or the other anyway. But if a corporation, Facebook or otherwise, lays down policies on paper, then it's not unreasonable to expect them to be followed. In this case, that wasn't happening, and not just in one or two isolated cases, but across a huge swath of apps involving tens of millions of users.

That may be your personal view on the subject, but you can't say that your distrust of facebook's settings as a means to keep your personal info amongst close friends has been substantiated(Andy Chalk, Canadian with a birthday on March 23 who seems to watch a lot of CNN). Certainly not in any way like what Google did with the Buzz debacle, and most people seem to be fine with handing Google all their contacts, credit card information and even privileged information.
Now I'm not saying that it's fine that people who play FarmVille be exposed as such, since it's easy to come up with an example where this would actually be harmful (say if a politician was a fan of a S&M group or something), but you let your own personal bias color the subject in such a way that anyone skimming the article comes out of it thinking Zinga games are nothing but data mining scams and that is also not cool, specially when the company acknowledges the problem and says they're working on preventing future leaks.
It's pretty ironic that your article even mentions that the press is misrepresenting the risk of selling or giving away FB user IDs when your article does exactly that.

 

[Stephenm]

Its crystal clear that people will stop using unreliable Social Networking sites in the next 5 years to come. To my view people will tend to use more practical apps like Chatroulette One-on-One video - Audio - Texts Chat application which can easily be bought from the famous site
http://www.rcpsecure.com/govisiochat

Can you imagine how powerful this leaked database is business-wise!
What are the Authorities doing to stop these kind of situations in the future?
Action should be taken now.

 

[Snotnarok]

Privacy and Facebook never went hand in hand.

 

[GamingAwesome1]

And that's another one to my list of reasons to never touch anything made by Zynga.

Also, I call bullshit! Technical problem? A leak?

Selling private information is not a leak! Nor is it a techinical problem.

Zynga are not only selling private information, they're lying through their goddamn teeth about it.


I loathe Zynga with an intense passion now, as if their streak of "games" (Read: series of progress bars with colourful graphics) wasn't enough.