The Wall Street Journal today reports that many Facebook applications are handing over user information—specifically, Facebook IDs—to online advertisers. Since a Facebook ID can easily be linked to a user’s real name, third party advertisers and their downstream partners can learn the names of people who load their advertisement from those leaky apps. This reportedly happens on all ten of Facebook’s most popular apps and many others.
The Journal article provides few technical details behind what they found, so here’s a bit more about what I think they’re reporting.
The content of a Facebook application, for example FarmVille, is loaded within an iframe on the Facebook page. An iframe essentially embeds one webpage (FarmVille) inside another (Facebook). This means that as you play FarmVille, your browser location bar will show http://apps.facebook.com/onthefarm, but the iframe content is actually controlled by the application developer, in this case by farmville.com.
The content loaded by farmville.com in the iframe contains the game alongside third party advertisements. When your browser goes to fetch the advertisement, it automatically forwards to the third party advertiser “referer” information—that is, the URL of the current page that’s loading the ad. For FarmVille, the URL referer that’s sent will look something like:
http://fb-tc-2.farmville.com/flash.php?…fb_sig_user=[User’s Facebook ID]…
And there’s the issue. Because of the way Zynga (the makers of FarmVille) crafts some of its URLs to include the user’s Facebook ID, the browser will forward this identifying information on to third parties. I confirmed yesterday evening that using FarmVille does indeed transmit my Facebook ID to a few third parties, including Doubleclick, Interclick and socialvi.be.
Facebook policy prohibits application developers from passing this information to advertising networks and other third parties. In addition, Zynga’s privacy policy promises that “Zynga does not provide any Personally Identifiable Information to third-party advertising companies.”
But evidence clearly indicates otherwise.
What can be done about this? First, application developers like Zynga can simply stop including the user’s Facebook ID in the HTTP GET arguments, or they can place a “#” mark before the sensitive information in the URL so browsers don’t transmit this information automatically to third parties.
Second, Facebook can implement a proxy scheme, as proposed by Adrienne Felt more than two years ago, where applications would not receive real Facebook IDs but rather random placeholder IDs that are unique for each application. Then, application developers can be free do whatever they want with the placeholder IDs, since they can no longer be linked back to real user names.
Third, browser vendors can give users easier and better control over when HTTP referer information is sent. As Chris Soghoian recently pointed out, browser vendors currently don’t make these controls very accessible to users, if at all. This isn’t a direct solution to the problem but it could help. You could imagine a privacy-enhancing opt-in browser feature that turns off the referer header in all cross-domain situations.
Some may argue that this leak, whether inadvertent or not, is relatively innocuous. But allowing advertisers and other third parties to easily and definitively correlate a real name with an otherwise “anonymous” IP address, cookie, or profile is a dangerous path forward for privacy. At the very least, Facebook and app developers need to be clear with users about their privacy rights and comply with their own stated policies.
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