Sarah Brown is unusually cautious when it comes to social networking. The college sophomore doesn’t have a MySpace page and, while she’s on Facebook, she does everything she can to keep her page as private as she can.

“I don’t want to have to distress about all the different online scandals and problems,” says Brown, an education major at St. Joseph College in Connecticut. She’d like to control her personal knowledge and keep it out of the hands of identity thieves or snooping future employers. “It’s just common sense.”

It sounds like her info is locked down and airtight. But is it?

Turns out, even the privacy-conscious Sarah Browns of the world freely hand by personal data to perfect strangers. They do so every duration they download and install what’s known as an “application,” one of thousands of mini-programs on a growing number of social networking sites that are designed by third-party developers for anything from games

and sports teams to trivia quizzes and virtual gifts.

Brown, for instance, has installed applications on her Facebook page for Boston Bruins fans and another that allows her to post “bumper stickers” on her own page and those of her friends. It’s a core way to communicate on social networking sites, which allow friends to create pages about themselves and post photos and details about their lives and interests.

citizens often think Facebook profiles and sometimes MySpace pages, whether they’re set as private, are only available to friends or specific groups, such as a university, workplace, or even a city.

But that’s not true whether they use applications. On Facebook, for instance, applications can only be downloaded whether a user checks a box allowing its developers to “know who I am and access my data,” which means everything on a profile, except contact info. Given little thought, agreeing to…

Orginal post by Top Tech News