None of you should be particularly shocked to know that a commitment to privacy is not one of Facebook's priorities. An article in the Wall Street Journal via Engadget reveals that Facebook shares your personal information with advertisers regardless of your privacy settings. Even setting every setting to "Friends Only" prevents nothing:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/18/wsj-facebook-apps-and-games-are-dishing-out-your-user-id-to-una/

That's still not terrible surprising to me, but what is is that under Application Settings, by default your Hometown, Likes and Interests, Education and Place of Work, and even Places I Check Into are available to any Application that [i]any of your friends[/u] use! If one of my friends uses, for example, Joe Shmo's Shady App, suddenly Joe Shmo knows where I live, where I went to school, where I work, and what I care about. Luckily, there's a fix: Settings -> Privacy -> Applications, Games, and Websites -> Info Accessible Through Friends. I strongly recommend strict-ifying that to nothing checked!

Edit: One last fun nugget at the bottom of that page: "Your name, profile picture, gender, networks and user ID (along with any other information you've set to everyone) is available to friends' applications unless you turn off platform applications and websites."

On the upside, Facebook now supports (by request) exporting your data outside of Facebook.

I was happy with myself to see all those boxes were unchecked

Kerm, that big paragraph reads like a cut out; since you don't check into any where x) And a few other things.

I'm not surprised that my Profile Picture and UID are shared with applications since, after making one, the UID is what personally identifies you every time you visit the site (or application). Thus, allowing you to comment with your name and picture. Making those three the at most minimal. Why they still reveal your network and gender, is beyond me.

I avoid most applications whenever possible. I despise how when someone sends me "Nickname answered a question about you!" I have to install an app to view the question, only to find out that I need to answer 50 people questions to unlock one answer, only to find out that once I answered the 50 questions, they decided it would now be 100...

I never install Facebook apps. Anymore. I only kept a few for nostalgic reasons.

The other applications are for websites - such as my own in beta - and for applications that I use to upload my photographs to facebook.

I unquestioningly block anyone who sends me something like that from interacting with me via Applications ever again.

In my case, that rarely happens anymore so I just ignore the request/notices, but I remember the days where I got about 40 a day. It was terrible...

The only group invites I ever accepted were for groups such as "People who hate getting invited to stupid pointless applications/groups".

Even if you don't use any Facebook Apps, but only have "Platform" thing like Trillian connected to Facebook Chat, then Facebook takes that as license to share your name and gender and age etc with ANY app that ANY friend adds.

Mafia wars and farmville are evil too

Well yeah, but that's partially because they're huge time drains, partially because they use skeevy marketing schemes, and partially because they have no respect for user privacy.