Facebook's Shadowy Profile

For some reason and from the very beginning I have distrusted Facebook. I have never signed onto the service despite the fact that virtually all of my extended family and most friends have. Intuitively I thought there was something wrong with the idea that one should share personal and confidential information with a company. Of course my bank, my broker, my doctor, and several insurance companies have my personal data but in those instances there is a need to know.
The revelation that Facebook is compiling "shadow profiles" of its users strikes me as both unethical and downright scary. If reports are correct Facebook's behavior is as bad as NSA's except there is no national security excuse. As ZD Net reports;

The personal information leaked by the bug is information that had not been given to Facebook by the users - it is data Facebook has been compiling on its users behind closed doors, without their consent.
A growing number of Facebook users are furious and demand to know who saw private information they had expressly not given to Facebook.
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 invisible collected information is then being stored in each user's 'shadow profile' that is somehow attached to accounts.
Users were clearly unaware that offsite data about them was being collected, matched to them, and stored by Facebook.

As I have posted earlier Facebook, Google, Linkedin, and several other Silicon valley companies have purchased Marco Rubio and Kelly Ayotte through their faux Americans for a Conservative Direction political action group to promote "immigration reform". It will be interesting to see where the political class stands on Facebook's spying. In the past credit rating agencies that merely tracked consumer transactions were thought to be the biggest threat to privacy. They were the subject of both congressional and the FTC investigations. Silicon Valley is inextricably linked to the Obama administration so one can't expect the politicized DOJ to look for criminal behavior. The European Union is not so much enthralled with the Valley and Germany is especially skeptical of private sector data collection and Google's Street View. It could be that cyber security will have to be off-shored like everything else.