The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/technology/19facebook.html?_r=1&src=busln
The latest challenge to that trust came on Monday, when Facebook acknowledged that some applications on its site, including the popular game FarmVille, had improperly shared identifying information about users, and in some cases their friends, with advertisers and Web tracking companies. The company said it was talking to application developers about how they handled personal information, and was looking at ways to prevent this from happening again.
Facebook’s acknowledgment came in response to an article in The Wall Street Journal that said several popular applications were passing a piece of data known as a user ID to outside companies, in violation of Facebook’s privacy policy.
“This is one more straw on the camel’s back that suggests that Facebook needs to think holistically not just about its privacy policies, but also about baking privacy into their technical design,” said Deirdre Mulligan, a privacy expert and professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.