Facebook is an outrageous privacy violator: user data exposed to ad companies

According to the reports by the Wall Street Journal Facebook users are unwittingly exposed to advertising and Internet tracking companies, through some popular applications. An independent investigation performed by the Journal revealed that tens of millions of Facebook app users including those who set their profiles to Facebook's strictest privacy settings are inadvertently providing access to their names and in some cases even their friend's names to third parties.

Such a state of affairs violates the rules of the social networking website and raises questions about its ability to keep identifiable information about its users' activities secure, the paper said.

Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Facebook told the Journal that it is taking steps to "dramatically limit" the exposure of users' personal information.

"A Facebook user ID may be inadvertently shared by a user's Internet browser or by an application," the spokesman told the paper.

Knowledge of an ID "does not permit access to anyone's private information on Facebook," he said, adding that the company would introduce new technology to contain the problem identified by the Journal.