Two More Cases of Third-Party Facebook App Data Exposure
Unfortunately, Facebook had a fundamental misunderstanding of how privacy <i>has</i> to work, and their users will be paying for their error for years.<p>If it's earth-shatteringly bad for your users if their private data is leaked by a third-party, you cannot exfiltrate that data to a thrid-party. Full stop. No amount of policy un-leaks data, and "You cannot continue to operate as a Facebook service" is an empty threat the moment it becomes more valuable for the third-party to violate the agreement than to continue to operate as a Facebook service.<p>The takeaway: if you are responsible for user privacy, <i>you</i> must do the computations on the user's data. Have partners ship you the computations they wish to do, vet them, and then ship them results compliant with your users' expectations. Don't hand third-parties a subset of the keys to the kingdom and expect an honor system to preserve user privacy.