Gigaom ran a new article about Facebook sending the user ID to third parties. Everybody is shouting foul play accusing facebook of doing unethical things and adding to the negative attention that facebook has gotten over the last one year.
I personally do not quite agree with the allegations. Here’s why -
Try this on your own page/profile ID. Visit “http://graph.facebook.com/user-id” and replace the “user-id” with your page ID or profile ID. If you don’t know your ID, here’s how to get it.
I just tried it on our company page, http://facebook.com/84ideas
84ideas FB page ID number : 47260686408
Then try http://graph.facebook.com/47260686408.
It pops up all the information that we chose to keep public, absolutely no breach of privacy policy here. Then why all the cry about foul play ?
What should Facebook Do ?
Facebook should probably encourage all the users to learn more about their privacy settings. It should educate the users about using “Preview My Profile” feature.
Go to Account -> Account Settings. Here click on “View Settings” on Basic Directory Information. Click on “Preview My Profile” to see what the world can see.
So may be all of us should learn, how we defined our privacy and then worry about possible privacy scams.