Despite promising it would not do so without consent, Facebook has been sending the usernames and other personal details of its members to its advertising partners. This revelation emerged in a Wall Street Journal report, and Facebook quickly moved to rewrite the privacy leak in its wake.

The issue has to do with the sending of user names or ID numbers of users who click on ads hosted on the popular social networking site to the advertisers. Depending on individual privacy settings, this could be used to uncover personal information such as name, age, gender and hometown, among other details.

According to a Facebook spokesman on Thursday, "We were recently made aware of one case where if a user takes a specific route on the site, advertisers may see that they clicked on their own profile and then clicked on an ad.

The issue has been fixed, though. According to the spokesman, "We fixed this case as soon as we heard about it. In addition, we have been working on ways to no longer include user IDs in Referer: URLs."

For more on this story:
- check out this article at CNET News
- check out this article at Wall Street Journal 

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