First, Facebook can and does police what people pass to third-party ad networks. When the FB platform first launched app developers did what you're describing.
In mid-2008 Facebook amended the TOS to prevent people from passing in PII to third-party ad networks. Apps that did this got banned.
In mid-2009 Facebook again amended the TOS to prevent people from passing in their friends UIDs, and apps doing this also got banned. In addition at least two ad networks were banned from ever advertising on the FB Platform again.
This nonsense from the WSJ is about passing your Facebook UID to third-party application, which (unlike the two cases above) happens automatically for every developer that has ever used any ad network.
Your Facebook UID is not private information. The only information one can get with your Facebook UID is the information you've decided to make public.
Now, you can argue that Facebook has incentivized people to overshare and not realize the consequences. That's fine.
But this article is 100% not about developers passing personal data to third-party ad networks, unless you somehow consider your Facebook user ID personal data. A stretch, considering until a year or so ago it was part of your profile URL, and still is for many people.
That's not entirely true, your Facebook UID always maps to your real name, gender, and your locale (country ie: en_us etc). That information in the hands of someone clever is more than ample to make some pretty decent guesses as to your identity, especially when you can pair it with other data that you may or may not have collected in your own app. In a previous job I held where we dealt with this sort of stuff facebook ids were generally thought of as PII.
First, Facebook can and does police what people pass to third-party ad networks. When the FB platform first launched app developers did what you're describing.
In mid-2008 Facebook amended the TOS to prevent people from passing in PII to third-party ad networks. Apps that did this got banned.
In mid-2009 Facebook again amended the TOS to prevent people from passing in their friends UIDs, and apps doing this also got banned. In addition at least two ad networks were banned from ever advertising on the FB Platform again.
This nonsense from the WSJ is about passing your Facebook UID to third-party application, which (unlike the two cases above) happens automatically for every developer that has ever used any ad network.
Your Facebook UID is not private information. The only information one can get with your Facebook UID is the information you've decided to make public.
Now, you can argue that Facebook has incentivized people to overshare and not realize the consequences. That's fine.
But this article is 100% not about developers passing personal data to third-party ad networks, unless you somehow consider your Facebook user ID personal data. A stretch, considering until a year or so ago it was part of your profile URL, and still is for many people.