Facebook issues ‘Zero Tolerance for Data Brokers’

Facebook has announced a series of punitive measures against developers who leaked user ids.

In a hard hitting blog post Facbook programmer Mike Vernal attacked applications that shared/leaked Facebook users’ ids while also defending the social network’s privacy policies.

Vernal blogged, “Facebook has never sold and will never sell user information. We also have zero tolerance for data brokers because they undermine the value that users have come to expect from Facebook. To restate our policy, developers may not pass any data from Facebook to data brokers. As such, we are taking action against these developers by instituting a 6-month full moratorium on their access to Facebook communication channels”

Attacking applications that leaked user data, Vernal said that developers that had been involved will be subjected to an “audit” to ensure their compliance with Facebook’s privacy policies.

In an effort to downplay fears that the data leak affected millions of Facebook users Vernal said “This impacts fewer than a dozen, mostly small developers, none of which are in the top 10 applications on Facebook Platform.” adding that “we found no evidence that this inadvertent sharing resulted in the collection of any private user information”

This is the  first major response from the social network since the Wall Street Journal discovered that Facebook applications leaked user. Read our report on the Facebook data leak here.