This was originally posted 16 years ago. Opinions, facts and reality may have changed.
When a company holds personal information on 500 million of us, is it too much to expect them to keep it secure?
The latest security breach to hit uber-social network Facebook involves the games that many people like to fill their social time with – Farmville, Frontierville and the like – and the advertising networks they interact with.
In plain English, the games were passing on the unique user ID of all their players. No matter what your personal security settings were, your details were being passed on.
What this actually means in practical terms is unclear. At the very least, the advertisers could match “anonymous” information to a person’s name. They wouldn’t be allowed access to any personal information the user wasn’t already sharing but we all now many people whose security on Facebook is, shall we say, less than thorough.
Even at that relatively-low level, the ability to match “anonymous” data to a user ID makes a mockery of, well, the anonymous element.
There will, I believe, come a tipping point soon against Facebook. A wild and crazy idea I know. But someone somewhere will be working on a competitor. And if Facebook keep losing the faith of their users…