Chris Soghoian weighs in on Facebook and it’s privacy.
Using nothing more complex than an advanced search on Facebook’s website, an interested person can learn extremely private pieces of information (sexuality, political leanings, religion) that are stored within another user’s private Facebook profile.
Users of Facebook can modify the privacy settings for their profile. This will restrict the public viewing and only permit a person’s immediate friends to view their profile. While Facebook does allow users to control their profile’s existence in search queries, this second preference is not automatically set when a user makes their profile private – and thus many users do not know to do so.
Users cannot be expected to know that the contents of their private profiles can be mined via searches, and thus, very few do set the search permissions associated with their profile.
It is clear however that users intend for their profiles to not be public. A large number of users have gone to the effort to restrict who can view their profiles, but many, unfortunately, remain exposed to a trivial attack.
[tags]Chris Soghoian, Privacy, Facebook Privacy, EU Privacy, Facebook[/tags]
