Facebook closes big privacy hole by fixing referrers

Last week, we told you how Facebook had been caught by the Wall Street Journal leaking user data to advertisers. The source of the leak was in the URLs that the advertisers would see as referrers, because Facebook URLs contain unique usernames or user ID numbers.

Now, Facebook has closed up that privacy hole, according to a new post on their official blog.

Facebook's Matt Jones writes, " We've been testing different solutions to remove user IDs completely from referrer URLs since their inclusion was first brought to our attention." The fix is now live in every browser but IE, and Facebook is working on that.

The technical details of how Facebook now redirects without exposing referrers are available in the blog post. I know I'm often hard on Facebook, especially about privacy issues, but I'm glad to see them fix this one so quickly.

Tags: advertisers, facebook, leak, privacy, referrers, security