Once again, Gizmodo has blown everything out of proportion, this time with Facebook's contact sync feature. So, here's a short blog post to explain things a bit.
If you have Facebook for your iPhone, it has a feature that lets you sync your phone contacts and Facebook contacts. I've had mine replace pictures on my phone with pictures of people on Facebook; That way, I don't have to take new ones each time someone gets a haircut or something like that. It's not really all that important, but it's nifty, so I have it turned on. This feature is OFF by default. I had to turn it on to get it to do anything.
On another note, if you were stupid enough to give Facebook your phone number, and set it public for all to see, then, on Facebook, you can access a list of your Facebook contacts who have shared their phone numbers online. They also add your synced phone contacts to that list, if you have that turned on.
Facebook is not stealing your phone number and handing it out to people. Facebook is not taking your contacts and publishing them to the internet, or putting them in a database. It is highly unlikely Facebook would ever make such information public in the first place. What benefit would that be to anyone?
