When it’s not killing office productivity across the whole of the developed world and acting as a springboard for murder, affairs and hilarious pranks, Facebook often gets it in the ear for its attitude towards its users’ privacy.
Security Consultant Ron Bowes has gotten on that bandwagon and generated a million column inches of free publicity for himself. He wrote a nifty script that scraped every publicly accessible Facebook profile, collating as it did all the data that was available.
Now that data is doing the rounds on torrent sites and the world waits with bated breath for another AOL Stalker kind of application and the many hours of fun that will be had from outing people’s curious personal beliefs or dubious connections.
The whole case has stirred up a predictable firestorm of responses from privacy campaigners who fear that somehow this informati0n could be put to evil ends. Well, no doubt it could. But on the other hand, if you want to get back in touch with people you’ve maybe not seen in a long while there’s little sense hiding behind a shield of anonymity. The very point of social networking sites is their openness.
And have you seen the shit that people are prepared to post? (visit Lamebook for many, many more. NSFW!)
I don’t think it’s unkind to suggest that privacy isn’t a massive concern for many of Facebook’s users.
While Facebook’s privacy settings may seem a little bit labyrinthine and could arguably have a higher privacy setting as the default setting, the rule is as always: caveat empor. If you value your privacy, then it is down to you to look after it by learning what protections Facebook offers and deciding whether engaging in such a forum is actually the kind of thing you want to do in the first place.
In the meantime, hats off to Ron Bowes on his stunt!
4 Comments
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Well, I never really post personal things on facebook. Those things are well, personal and private.
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There is a new social networking experience coming this fall. It’s called somethingcoolhappened.com. You can go there now to view a preview video and to preregister. With this site you can interact with friends, create your own unique avatars, upload videos, pictures or stories of something cool that happened to you or someone else! You also get full anonymity. It is going to be awesome! Check it out.
Think of this site as more like a combination of YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and then something totally brand new. With this site you will get your anonymity back, no more personal information floating around being sold off and you will get to be creative, compete with other people if you wish and just have fun in a great positive atmosphere.
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Well, this has certainly been one sobering experience for Facebook users (and everyone who is participating with any.social medium really)
For many, I’m sure, those FB privacy settings have been more than a labyrinthine. Some of my friends have wiped out all of their sensitive info after that, and either quit or decided to significantly limit their use of Facebook.
dontcha you just wish you had an ‘undo’ button for inside your head