Facebook and Others Caught Sending User Data to Advertisers

The Wall Street Journal is reporting on what could be a major scandal brewing for Facebook, MySpace and other social networks: despite assurances to the contrary, the sites have apparently been sending personal and identifiable information about users to their advertisers without consent.

Large advertising companies including Google’s DoubleClick and Yahoo’s Right Media were identified as having received information including usernames or ID numbers that could be traced back to individual profiles as users clicked on ads. The data could potentially be used to look up personal information about the user, including real name, age, occupation, location, and anything else made public on the profile. Both of the aforementioned companies denied being aware of the “extra” data they were receiving and claim they have not made use of it.

The WSJ goes on to report that since raising questions about the practice with Facebook () and MySpace (), both companies have since rewritten at least some of the code that allowed transmission of identifiable data. Beyond those two companies, LiveJournal, Hi5 (), Xanga () and Digg () made the list of sites identified as sending identifiable information back to advertisers when a user clicked on individual ads.