Facebook Shadow Profiles Link

From Violet Blue at ZDNet:

Facebook was accidentally combining user’s shadow profiles with their Facebook profiles and spitting the merged information out in one big clump to people they ‘had some connection to’ who downloaded an archive of their account with Facebook’s Download Your Information (DYI) tool.

According to the admissions in its blog, posted late Friday afternoon, Facebook appears to be obtaining users' offsite email address and phone numbers and attempting to match them to other accounts. It appears that the covertly collected information is then being stored in each Facebook user’s invisible ‘shadow profile’ that is somehow attached to accounts.

But don’t worry, they fixed the problem by hiding the shadow profile from all users. So, nothing to worry about. Solved.