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Facebook says no data was “stolen,” the site was not hacked, and that this is how the site is supposed to work.
At the same time, users are more than a bit perturbed that,Inflatable Obstacles, because of this document, they’ll probably be exposed to more spam and more malicious phishing attempts to try to obtain their login information and other personal data.
So what really is private on Facebook? What data is safe and what isn’t?
For starters, the company is right: Your name and the fact that you have a Facebook page are, by and large, unprotected from the rest of the Web. As Facebook notes in its Privacy Policy, “Such information may, for example, be accessed by everyone on the internet (including people not logged into Facebook), be indexed by third-party search engines, and be imported, exported, distributed, and redistributed by us and others without privacy limitations. Such information may also be associated with you, including your name and profile picture, even outside of Facebook, such as on public search engines and when you visit other sites on the internet.”
But more important, if you haven’t taken the time to manually update Facebook’s privacy settings, a lot more information than that is freely available online and is subject to that same lack of restriction. Anything you have marked as “Everyone” in the Facebook Privacy Settings module is open to the world, and that can indeed be dangerous.
Facebook gives you a fair amount of control over your info, but it’s up to you to change the settings and restrict certain information more tightly than Facebook does by default. That means your photos and wall posts may indeed by seen by the world unless you restrict their viewing to just Friends (or even Friends of Friends). Images may be indexed and archived by search engines, and they’re likely to be associated directly with your name.
The bottom line is the same as ever: If you don’t want something to be seen on Facebook, make absolutely sure your privacy settings are correct. And, of course,Juicy Couture shoes, the only way to truly keep something out of the hands of those you don’t want to have it is to make sure it never gets on the Internet at all.
— Christopher Null is a technology writer for Yahoo! News.
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Today’s revelation about the existence of a document that details the names, URLs, and unique Facebook IDs of 100 million of the site’s users has raised new questions about what is and what is not private on the immensely popular website.