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A. Facebook has made it clear during the big "everyone" push that hiding your friends on your profile page is not the same thing as hiding it from public acces

A. Facebook has made it clear during the big "everyone" push that hiding your friends on your profile page is not the same thing as hiding it from public access; it is still considered public information by Facebook and can be accessed as such. B. Much of your personal data is still publicly available through Facebook Graph, regardless of how much you try to lock down your profile. It's only a matter of time before people start scraping this information and publishing it in a way that it's clearly accessible from Google, and Facebook won't be able to do anything about it.

brown9-2 16y ago
B. Much of your personal data is still publicly available through Facebook Graph, regardless of how much you try to lock down your profile. I don't think this is true, as an example here is what the graph API shows about my account: { "id": "800679", "name": "Matthew Brown", "first_name": "Matthew", "last_name": "Brown", "location": { "id": null, "name": null }, "gender": "male" } In the past I've had to go through all of the privacy settings painstakingly to make sure nothing is public, but I don't see how it can be said that you can't hide what you want from the public / graph API.
- sounddust 16y ago
  1) The graph also shares your picture (800679/picture?type=large), likes (800679/likes) and your timezone as well. I consider this "much of your personal data." 2) Before the Graph, it was possible to hide all of this information completely if you used the strictest privacy settings. You could completely hide the fact that you had a facebook account; even the things you published on public FB pages would just show your first name and a placeholder photo. 3) Before the Graph, it wasn't possible to systematically scrape the info of all Facebook users sequentially. The fact that this is now possible will make it easy to collate the data and publish information about you that you haven't personally shared. Most users' photo albums are set to "everyone" (by accident, of course), but previously they were pretty much undiscoverable even if they were public. I'm pretty certain that this is going to be exploted by sploggers and others, just like every other large publicly accessible source of data.
LiveTheDream 16y ago
How is your friend list still public information, if you set it to private? You are suggesting that the privacy settings don't actually do anything, which is inaccurate. For example, if your friend list privacy is set to "Everyone", accessing your facebook page while logged out will show a random sample of your friends. Switch the privacy setting to "only friends" or something restrictive, return to the profile page in a logged out state, and note that your friends no longer are displayed.
- pasbesoin 16y ago
  The friends list is still available to third parties through the data API's. How long until a third party provides that data as a product? Actually, Facebook itself is already offering that data to employers, IIRC. EDIT: To clarify, I'm not talking about the publicly exposed "graph". I'm talking about what they've long provided to their third party affiliates, e.g. all the approved Facebook "application" developers/hosts. P.S. Notice the nice information asymmetry involved in this, as well. You, as a private individual, have no access to this. But designated (and / as in paying) parties do, at the sole selection (I think I'll avoid use of the word "discretion") of Facebook.

brown9-2 16y ago

B. Much of your personal data is still publicly available through Facebook Graph, regardless of how much you try to lock down your profile. I don't think this is true, as an example here is what the graph API shows about my account: { "id": "800679", "name": "Matthew Brown", "first_name": "Matthew", "last_name": "Brown", "location": { "id": null, "name": null }, "gender": "male" } In the past I've had to go through all of the privacy settings painstakingly to make sure nothing is public, but I don't see how it can be said that you can't hide what you want from the public / graph API.

sounddust 16y ago
1) The graph also shares your picture (800679/picture?type=large), likes (800679/likes) and your timezone as well. I consider this "much of your personal data." 2) Before the Graph, it was possible to hide all of this information completely if you used the strictest privacy settings. You could completely hide the fact that you had a facebook account; even the things you published on public FB pages would just show your first name and a placeholder photo. 3) Before the Graph, it wasn't possible to systematically scrape the info of all Facebook users sequentially. The fact that this is now possible will make it easy to collate the data and publish information about you that you haven't personally shared. Most users' photo albums are set to "everyone" (by accident, of course), but previously they were pretty much undiscoverable even if they were public. I'm pretty certain that this is going to be exploted by sploggers and others, just like every other large publicly accessible source of data.

LiveTheDream 16y ago

How is your friend list still public information, if you set it to private? You are suggesting that the privacy settings don't actually do anything, which is inaccurate. For example, if your friend list privacy is set to "Everyone", accessing your facebook page while logged out will show a random sample of your friends. Switch the privacy setting to "only friends" or something restrictive, return to the profile page in a logged out state, and note that your friends no longer are displayed.

pasbesoin 16y ago
The friends list is still available to third parties through the data API's. How long until a third party provides that data as a product? Actually, Facebook itself is already offering that data to employers, IIRC. EDIT: To clarify, I'm not talking about the publicly exposed "graph". I'm talking about what they've long provided to their third party affiliates, e.g. all the approved Facebook "application" developers/hosts. P.S. Notice the nice information asymmetry involved in this, as well. You, as a private individual, have no access to this. But designated (and / as in paying) parties do, at the sole selection (I think I'll avoid use of the word "discretion") of Facebook.