The biggest
privacy problem with Facebook isn’t Facebook itself, it’s Facebook’s apps.
There are more than 500,000 games, puzzles, quizzes and other time wasters in
the Facebook platform, many of which exist for the sole purpose of sucking data
out of your account. Worse, these apps not only can access your information,
they can also grab data from your friends’ profiles, depending on their privacy
settings. Thank you, obnoxious Farmville fans.
Facebook
establishes limits about what data apps can access and what they can do with
it, but they don’t appear terribly motivated to enforce those rules. For
example, in October 2010, ten popular Facebook apps were found to be slurping
up user data in direct violation of Facebook’s own terms. In response, Facebook
removed some of those apps on a Friday, then reinstated them on the following
Monday.
Now you can
take matters into your own hands and find out who the real data vampires are.
PrivacyScore from PrivacyChoice is a Chrome plug in that rates how each app
deals with your data on a scale from 0 to 100. It can also do the same for Web
sites. You can view these scores on the Web, on Facebook or, if you’ve
installed the Chrome extension, by clicking the PS icon in the browser bar when
you install an app.
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