Facebook faces fresh fears over leaked data

David Swan
Wednesday, 11 May 2011 20:34

Your IT - Home IT

A new report from Symantec has revealed that potentially millions of Facebook users have been vulnerable to misuse of information by Facebook advertisers for years.

 

The data leaked includes chats, private profiles and pictures, all of which were potentially available to advertisers through over 100,000 Facebook applications.

The report comes as another report alleges that 7.5 million Facebook users are under the age of 13, and are therefore lying about their age.

According to Symantec, the hole was apparently opened up after certain Facebook applications neglected secure data being transferred from users to some Facebook applications, which would have allowed third parties to access said data via a cached token that would wrongly point to those third parties as being the user.

Facebook largely dismissed the report in a statement, noting that the Symantec report contained 'inaccuracies' and "left out important information."

Another report, from Consumer Reports, ran some commonly used Facebook apps through some tests in an attempt to deduce what info an app can access.

The company said, 'When a staffer installed the iMovie app on an iPad 2 and gave it access to his Facebook account, it requested access to messages in his Facebook inbox and to be able to RSVP to events on his behalf. He was able to delete those privileges once he discovered the app had obtained them.'

Sharing data to applications can be turned off.

Users need to go to Account, and then Privacy Settings. Under Applications and Websites click Edit Your Settings. On the next page click Edit Settings next to Applications You Use. Next to Jumo, click Edit Settings. From here you can remove the application, or just remove the optional settings, such as allowing applications to your wall with status messages.

You can follow the same process to find the optional settings on each of your active Facebook Applications.