The "App Gap"

A friend sent me this article from the ACLU website that shows just how much information of ours Facebook really makes public. Even if you have your privacy settings as high as possible, some information still can be seen by everyone: your profile picture, current city, friends list, and gender, for instance. If you don't find this worrisome, know also that any external application you download onto your Facebook -one of those dumb quizzes, Farmville, whatever - has access not only to all of the information in your profile but also all the information in your friends' profiles. So you might restrict those pictures of you shotgunning a beer at DKE so that only your friends can see them, but if any app programmer decides that they are an important part of the game he is making, he can go ahead and include them in his code. The ACLU has a petition in protest of this "app gap" and other privacy violations that you can sign if you wish. I doubt Mark Zuckerberg will pay much attention, but you can't start a fire without a spark.