Facebook Creepers, Unite – New Site Policy Weakens Data Privacy

Pssst, want to check some photos of that hot chick/fella that won’t won’t have you as a friend even on Facebook? Thanks to the social networking site’s new privacy rules, you probably can for at least a while. Originally billed as a move to enhance user privacy, Facebook actually ends up exposing more user information in some cases:

Profile photographs now default to “friends of friends”, meaning anyone with a mutual friend may browse whatever you post (some people have complained that their profile photos and other photo albums were made completely public,)
The new “recommended settings” option usually amounts to sharing personal information with everyone – friend or not.
There is no more option to prevent Facebook apps (eg Mafia Wars, Farmville) from harvesting your personal information. Apps can also harvest your public information when installed on a friend’s account
Fan pages are now permanently public.
Sharing information with “everyone” now includes the rest of the web, not just everyone logged onto Facebook

It is easy enough to reverse most of this exposure using the profile security settings (set all photo albums to “only friends”) but it would have been nice of Facebook to mention their plans to default profile photos to public status.

To the company’s credit, friend lists are no longer published on user pages, meaning it is no longer possible for casual users to browse each others’ lists of contacts. However, this information is still available to application developers, and possible even search engines. The latter is noted because Facbook recently signed a deal with Microsoft to publish user content via the Bing search engine. Again, users can opt out of this arrangement through their privacy settings, but Facebook hasn’t gone out of its way to tell us how.

In the meantime, while Facebook users slowly realize their photos are in the public domain, you can sneak a peek at photos that weren’t meant for your eyes. Try to resist the temptation.

(h/t to Jeela for first alerting me)