[classicman]

Facebook applications raise privacy fears

Facebook users who sign up for We’re Related are given little idea how much of their personal information will be siphoned by the application, or – in the soothingly benign language of social networking – with whom this information will be “shared”.

New users are asked to give a blanket approval to let the application “pull your profile information, photos, your friends’ info and other content that it requires to work”. The application then appears to give itself the power to release this information to anyone else on Facebook – even if users have set stricter privacy settings to limit access to their personal data.