• BusinessWeek, Thursday, April 2, 2009 11:30 AM

Facebook has gone to great lengths to protect the privacy of users on its own site, but what about on other sites? Through Facebook Connect, users can now share their profiles and friend lists on participating third-party sites, but who is responsible for defending their data?

Privacy watchdogs claim services like Facebook Connect raise new questions about how user data is collected and shared among Web sites. Such tools "unearth a trove of new data about a visitor" notes BusinessWeek's Douglas MacMillan. "I'm wondering if people really understand when they're using Facebook Connect that other sites get access to their whole user profile and social graph," says Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum.

Facebook Connect already has more than 8,000 partner sites. Joost, for example, checks the ages of FB users and relays that info back to CBS, who wants to get a better idea of which users are watching CBS programming. For its part, Facebook stresses buyer beware for FB Connect, as users voluntarily opt-in to these information exchanges. When users try to log in with a Facebook name and password to another site, they receive a message that that site is about to "pull your profile information, photos, your friends' info, and other content that it requires to work." Even so, Web users may not understand this, says Jeffrey Chester, executive director at the Center for Digital Democracy. "It's about collecting your data, ultimately wherever you go, and being able to deliver targeted communications to you" based on that data, he says.

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