Adding all the latest new widgets to your facebook page can cause you to loose a lot more privacy than once expected by giving personal information to a host of strangers. Some security experts have found that developers of the games and quizzes on the popular networking site can access your hometown, educuation and employment information and use them in harmful ways.

Even private profiles which have private details available to only specific friends are at risk for privacy invasion. It is largely due to the fact that both Facebook and Myspace allow developers to view members’ information when they add a program.

According to a Washington Post article, Facebook started allowing outside developers to create programs for users to add to their profiles. Since then over 24,000 programs have been created by over 400,000 outside developers and the popularity is enormous with over 95% of all users downloading one of these outside programs.

In fact, the popularity is so large that even venture-capital firms have formed exclusively to fund their development. There was even a contest at Stanford University to create them.

Other networking sites such as Myspace, Hi5 and Bebo, are using Google’s OpenSource which allows developers to spread their applications to various social networking sites at the same time.

Each social networking site has its own rules as to what developers can see when a user downloads an application. Myspace which is the largest site with over 110 million users allows developers to see users name, profile picture and friend lists when they download a program. When a user downloads a program on Facebook, developers are allowed to see everything on a users profile except contact information. Developers can also see everyone that is on a users friend list profiles as well.

Both social networking sites have a policy that developers have access to this information for only 24 hours and it is used only to make adjustments to programs to tailor features to users and is not to be released to third parties such as advertisers. Facebook also claims that they remove programs that abuse users such as requiring them to invite users to use their applications.

According to Adrienne Felt who recently studied Facebook security found that of the 150 most popular programs, 90 percent had unnecessary access to private data. “Once the information is on a third-party server, Facebook can’t do anything about it,” she said.

Although some developers may use private information, some developers such as Slide who has the three most popular applications states that they use the information so users can interact with their friends by reminding them of birthdays.

However the revealing of personal information on quizzes and maps can cause a potential risk of allowing companies to peace information together for a larger security threat. Some of the programs also require answering questions which are commonly used as security information used by financial companies.

The risks with networking are large and should be taken with heed. With the large amount of downloading applications and releasing personal information is not only to keep in touch with your friends, but also to individuals who may not have the best of all intentions.