Whenever we post our personal information on the Internet, it becomes available to everyone—even people we’d rather not saw it—and in some cases, unscrupulous companies will use this information against us. In a recent debacle, a few Facebook developers were caught using an unexpected trick to identify app users and sell their public information combined with their usage information to 3^rd party vendors.

According to an article over at PCWord, Facebook has responded by throwing the book at the app developers caught selling user information. They’ve also been moving extremely swiftly to mend their image as well as provide tighter regulation for user personal information.

Facebook says “fewer than a dozen” Facebook application developers were selling UIDs to data brokerage firms. As a result of their naughty behavior, the data-selling developers have been suspended from Facebook for six months.   Facebook will also audit the developers to make sure they don’t sell Facebook user information again.   The social network also says it is working on a technical solution to make it impossible for developers to leak UIDs in the future.

Facebook didn’t name the developers or the applications they produced, but the company did say they were “mostly small” Facebook application makers and none were behind the top 10 applications on Facebook.

What might be misunderstood about this particular debacle is that private user information has not been leaked—only matter identifying particular users of an app. So, people who had profiles that were entirely private possibly suffered less, but the information would still be enough for an advertiser to find a user on Facebook. The UID, or unique-identifier, of a user allows direct access to the user’s page where friends see information opened to them and the public sees public information.

Facebook already has plans to solve this by allowing apps access to a user’s wall/profile without giving the developers the ability to easily grab a user’s UID. I expect that Facebook will calculate special UIDs that only get sent to a particular app by salting every UID with encryption that only works for a particular app. In this fashion the app will be able to directly access the users who have signed up to it, but at no point will the app ever have direct access to the UID of the user—and thus won’t be able to sell it to anyone.

The social network company has also mentioned that they will crack down harder and harsher on anyone shown to be data mining user information in an attempt to pierce that veil of privacy.

Good first step for Facebook. Show us they’re willing to step on people breaching their Terms of Service, protect our privacy from unscrupulous developers, and restore some sanity to an area where they have more control over our data than we do.

In the wake of this fiasco, Facebook has also moved to mend their public relations. So keep your eye on this one, their founder, Mark Zuckerberg, is donating to the Newark school system—to the tune of $100 million dollars. Now that’s one giant gift.

I wonder if they’ll start offering online privacy and security classes to the school children as well. Grade school is an excellent time to start teaching kids about how their personal data is disseminated online and that even what data they’d consider public, and what social networks they’re part of, can get minced up by dodgy advertising agencies and companies.