At ‘Wall Street Journal‘ they studied works the most popular applications on Facebook and found that the vast majority of the collection and the authors provide more personal information of users as they should. Among the top ten most popular everyone are sinners, because at least provide information on the profile number (profile ID), which is accessible to the public part of the profile. For some it does not help either setting the strictest privacy profile, since it is certain (among the top ten are three such) applications smoothly ignored and share more.
Applications are small plug-ins, where Facebook users may allow accessing their profile; they can play games, share their interests with others and do a thousand other important things. Usually written by independent developers and are not part of the official Facebook site, even though the words of Mark Zuckerberg they are important extension of the basic functionality of Facebook.
The identification number of the profile information is not as innocent as it seems at first sight. It is possible to see the public part of the profile, which is in any case, the name and surname of the user, usually avatar photo and at negligent users a bit more. The problem is that applications sell ID-number at least to 25 advertising firms who can build from them the whole profile. For ‘RapLeaf‘ is already known that the ID-number associated with other data in their databases (from other sources) and thus building a database is prohibited. RapLeaf is pronounced that this was not done intentionally; Facebook says that their skills have drastically limited.
Facebook is fighting against abuses. Thus, their policy prohibits applications to collect data about users and give them to the others, even if users might agree with this (sorry, applications that do not stick). In addition, the sixth October offered a control panel where users can see which information about them collected by the application. Unfortunately it is not clear what information about the user collect applications of his friends. And data show that 70 percent of users use applications on a monthly basis. So, if you have 100 friends (very low estimate), the probability that none of them use applications, is 10-51 percent.
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