Facebook are spying!

FB doesn't need to do any of this, but private parties are currently writing software apps. to gather profile data for marketing purposes.

This is not a new development.
FB and other social networking sites are being mined for data from outside sources. It's current.

This guy is amateur but his software was developed for the purpose of distributing to the pros. Lots of money to be made by all sorts of means, via data mining.

Now, after gathering the data from Facebook’s site using software he designed and honed in the process, and making a first round of enticing observations, he wants to turn the raw data he’s culled over to academia for further analysis. But he also hopes to steer investors and customers to his own software and services for further data gathering and aggregation.

"I'm much better at building the pipeline for processing the data than I am at doing really rigorous stuff with the results that come out at the end," Warden said in a telephone interview. "The patterns that I've blogged about in the U.S. data are very qualitative."

[edit on 23-2-2010 by LadySkadi]

Are you talking about unknown apps being added automatically?

I had a app pop in the notification that looks just like fb message where they say your friends name and say they made a comment on your photos click here to view the comment. So I did and it took me to a screen saying thank you for adding image friend and redirected me to a board form with people that complained not knowing this app and stuff. Then notice in the source code of that page they ran some _javascript which I read which grab all out data for some website.

I alerted everyone on that form that they were hacked. I then later on notice many spamming e-mails going to my e-mail address that I used for facebook.

I then notice the hacker iming people acting like me asking them that I am stranded on the local area and need 6,000 bucks and asks my friends to wire it to some location in africa.

I logged in and changed my fb passed and all was good.

just saying if you see apps added without your knowledge then your hacked. there is some apps out there that will steal all your information that you provide to fb.

Just telling you this. I doubt FB is spying I know for sure they steal your info and resell it for money to marketeers or hackers etc.

I posted a form on ats a while back about a wikipedia posting of the CEO of twitter that they admitted they resell your tweets to marketing people and to hackers or anyone that would what your tweets. Even private investigators would pay tweeter to spy on someones postings on twitter.

I bet you can spy on anyone you want as long you know what websites they use and just offer the webmaster or website owner some money and you could access that persons account.