Give me my data app allows users to retrieve their personal information on Facebook.

Recently, Facebook has proceeded to remove users personal information that they have spend years to built, from their profiles to make room to its newest project called " Open Graph."
With that latest initiative Facebook plans to connect users to others people, places, and things across the entire Web. It is part of the much more buzzed about "Instant Personalization" project which is Facebook attempt to link with as many Web sites as possible by letting them install its "Like" button. With that button, Facebook users who visit those sites will have the possibility to click on it and have the page in which it was in, linked to their profiles and have all their friends made aware of the action. More of that Facebook Instant Personalization project can be found at this previous post.
Facebook removal of users' personal information from their profile interfaces has been met with a lot of negative feed back from perplexed users. The good news is that that information is not deleted, it is just removed and moved to a place unreachable by the new interface. But with the whole thing done without any explanation from Facebook to make its users understand what is going on or to give them the necessary tools to retrieve that information, it did not take long for confusion to reign in. Fortunately, there is a little known app called Give Me My Data created earlier this year and available at Givememydata.com that walks people through the steps of retrieving their data. And according to the New York Times, the free app will let users retrieve not only their personal information on their profile pages, but a variety of their Facebook data making it possible for them to make copy to be saved somewhere else.

For more, see NYTimes.com

How to opt out of Facebook sharing option.

With the announcement last week by Facebook of the expansion of its "Like" program to other sites, little notice were made of the possible ramifications of such program. The program works by allowing outside participant sites to embed Facebook Like button on their sites. Once embeded, the button will appear on its page of the site and will give Facebook members a chance to click on it when they see something that they like. That seemingly harmless action will have a lot of ramifications since since that one click will essentially broadcast the user action to his or her network through his or her newsfeed. Also, all the names of the user Facebook friends who have already clicked on the button, will be broadcasted alongside.
In conjunction of the new Like program, Facebook has launched a new innovation called Open Graph which is a technology that allows certain sites like Pandora, Yelp, and Docs by Microsoft, to personalize their offerings to users based on the information stored in their personal profiles. That level of personalization is possible because Facebook gives those sites access to those users information. Ant that's where it gets scary for unscrupulous users who unwillingly may be giving away access to their personal information.
As you may have noticed, the opt-in option is by default and users who do not want their information accessed that way, have the means to opt-out.
You can either turn Instant Personalization off entirely at Facebook, or you can opt out at individual websites on a case-by-case basis. The latter is easy; the first time you arrive at a website that uses Instant Personalization, a bar will appear at the top of the page letting you know that’s what’s happening and giving you the option to either accept that or not.
To opt out of the personalization feature altogether, you can do so by going to Facebook home page, access your "Account" and click on "Privacy Settings."

For more, see the Hardfordinformer.com