Might this be another reason to ditch Facebook?
From Newser:
Facebook Handing Advertisers Names, Hometowns: "Despite promises to the contrary, Facebook and MySpace are supplying information to advertisers that can be used to find an individual's name, age, hometown and occupation, reports the Wall Street Journal . Typically on the Web, advertisers receive nothing more than an unintelligible string of letters and numbers 'identifying' an Internet...
The full article can be read in the Wall Street Journal:
Facebook, MySpace and several other social-networking sites have been sending data to advertising companies that could be used to find consumers' names and other personal details, despite promises they don't share such information without consent ... the practice, which most of the companies defended, sends user names or ID numbers tied to personal profiles being viewed when users click on ads. After questions were raised by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook and MySpace moved to make changes. By Thursday morning Facebook had rewritten some of the offending computer code ... advertising companies are receiving information that could be used to look up individual profiles, which, depending on the site and the information a user has made public, include such things as a person's real name, age, hometown and occupation ... several large advertising companies identified by the Journal as receiving the data, including Google Inc.'s DoubleClick and Yahoo Inc.'s Right Media ...
OK. Have you dumped your Facebook account yet? While I do miss the networking with friends, I'm surviving pretty well without it. I sure don't miss the malware. Or the privacy settings that require a degree in nuclear physics to figure out. Or the random people I really don't want to hear from. Or all this Farmville and FishyWorld or whatever-it-is crap that's cluttering up my computer.
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