Facebook Privacy

15:02 30th July 2010

Facebook privacy has popped up again in the news, yawn.

The personal details of more than 100 million Facebook users have been published on the internet.

Yes and why is this news? Those 100 million Facebook users gave their 'personal details' (happens to be name, gender, profile picture and locality) to Facebook on the internet. So, I am pretty sure that they were expecting to see their names on the internet.

Story Background: A security consultant put the list of users together using the Facebook Graph API. The dataset has now been uploaded to torrent sites allowing people easy access to the names and URLs of Facebook users.

So what is all the fuss about?

The data that has been collected is freely available via a search on Facebook or by a search engine. If people do not want their names 'published' on the internet, then they either need to:

• a) use a fake name as their online identity
• b) stay offline

facebook api privacy

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