Facebook Cracks Down On Data Brokers

Work with Facebook? Secretly selling UID data to data brokers? Bad! You're about to get in trouble. Facebook posted Friday that not only do they and never had they sold user information, they've got zero tolerance for data brokers "because they undermine the value that users have come to expect from Facebook." I wonder if they don't know that a lot of Facebook users know full well that their info is being sold, and don't mind because they know they're on the internet?

Either way, Facebook has stated and now re-stated the fact that they do not abide developers passing data from Facebook to data brokers, and they are now "including anonymous identifiers in this protected category of Facebook data." Like Batman, they will catch you and tie you up and toss you in front of the police station. They've already caught a few developers selling lists of UIDs, and those developers are on a 6-moth full moratorium on their access to Facebook communications and Facebook is requiring them "to submit their data practices to an audit in the future to confirm that they are in compliance with our policies."

Facebook is careful to note that there were less than a dozen developers caught doing such bad deeds, all of them smalltime creators with no large-scale apps under their belt. A data broker who was engaged in deals to purchase UID lists has come forward to work with Facebook in agreeing to delete all of those UIDs and has agreed not to work with or around Facebook ever again. (I wonder what they told them, that they'd tell their mothers? Crazy.)

[Via Facebook Developers ]