How to sniff out private information on Facebook
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Social network makes it a snap Facebook users who like to control who gets to see your account details, take note: political views, religious back ground and other sensitive details may be wide open to prying eyes even though you've configured your profile so its viewable only to designated friends.â¦
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On the JSLabs blog today, there's a new tutorial showing how you (yes you) can use the Facebook Developer's API to pull information from their systems.   The facebook API allows you to access profiles, friends, photos, and events.  To access the API from an outside server, you need to go through the following steps:  login to your Facebook Account get an account key Get the client library The php 5 library can be found here    He uses the PHP library to make the connection - a simple call to the API (complete with API key, the location of the interface, a secret key, and a session key to provide a unique identifier. The request made logs a user in (much have a valid Facebook account) and grabs: the count of the messages waiting, the number of posts to your wall, and a list of available photo albums.
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Users will be able to choose whether their pages are revealed to outside search engines.
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There's a fascinating debate today going on about Scoble and his Facebook data. Here's the story so far. Plaxo, on behalf of Scoble, ran a screen scraper on his Facebook account to download information about at least some of his Facebook friends. Facebook detected the scraper and turned off his account, with an email explaining that he had violated their terms of service. The debate: Who is right -- Scoble or Facebook? While there are certainly arguments that Facebook has some rightness, most of it, imho, is with Scoble. Sure, some of the data may "belong" to his friends, like their birthday and mail address. Technically of course the data doesn't belong to anyone, it's data about them, and many organizations have this data. Are bloggers really saying that organizations have more rights than people? Isn't blogging all about a level playing field? My bank knows my birthday and my email address. Why shouldn't Scoble? (Maybe he shouldn't.) Scoble called a few minutes ago. I asked what the consensus was. He said it was about 70 percent in his favor, 30 percent in Facebook's. I think we can win over the 30 percent by saying that there should be a system whereby people can decide how much information they want to share with Scoble, or people like Scoble, or me, or people like me, or BofA or the DEA, KGB or CIA. Further, that system is not Facebook, unless they change.  Now, I think there's a pretty good chance that Facebook will change and give Scoble his data and turn his account back on. I think Facebook wants to give us access to our data, but if they just turned the feature on, there would be a shitstorm, kind of like the one that's raging right now. Except this time Facebook has defenders, which they must find refreshing, because every time there's been a shitstorm around Facebook they've always been seen as 100 percent evil by most people. (Not by me, btw.) Maybe they're getting smart there over at Facebook. Maybe they will relent, kind of admit they were wrong, and secretly be happy that they got to open their network up some more.  However, if Facebook doesn't open up and allow people a system to say who can access what information, we still have to create that system somehow. Google could have done it, but they didn't. Same with Yahoo or Microsoft. These companies don't want to empower the users, but if they studied history, they'd see that the evolution of computers always comes in fits and starts. A period when the technology is new and people are snowed by the companies and let them have full control. Gradually people understand what's going on, and figure out they're being screwed but they accept it. And then explosively the whole thing disintegrates in a new layer of technology.  It's a big effin loop we're in. One of these times around one of the companies that feels (incorrectly) that they have a lock on their users, will voluntarily give it up and be a leader in Generation N+1. I've never seen it happen, but in theory I think it could.  In other words, Apple and Microsoft could have invented the web instead of TBL. DEC and Data General could have invented the personal computer instead of Apple and Microsoft (I know this is a simplification, there were lots of individuals and small companies that did it.) And IBM could have invented the minicomputer instead of DEC and Data General. And btw, the NY Times and CNN could have invented blogging and RSS.  So Facebook has the opportunity to be a crossover company, part of the next generation -- or a last gasp of the generation that's about to run out of gas. It's their choice. And it's fitting somehow that Scoble is the poster child for users in this cycle.
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Rethinking privacy in an immodest age.
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An impending update from Facebook will make it possible for you to make your profile look a whole lot neater by hiding excess applications.
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NEW YORK Oct. 18, 2004 - People who use public or workplace computers for e-mail, instant messaging and Web searching have a new privacy risk to worry about: Google&#39;s free new tool that indexes a PC&#39;s contents for quickly locating data.
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Facebook is asking all of the right questions.
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These aren't your teenager's social networking sites.
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Online hangout Facebook, seeking to avoid a second revolt over privacy, is offering members more controls over their personal profile pages as it relaxes eligibility requirements to join.
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Facebook is now taking steps to prevent some third-party applications from engaging in "inappropriate actions".
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Serves up ads for deceptive security software Facebook has become the latest website to be found pushing services that delivers highly deceptive security warnings designed to trick users into buying software.â¦
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In the wake of a Wired News investigation, the social networking site
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Anonymous data sets are an enormous boon for researchers, but the recent de-anonymization of Netflix customer data shows there are privacy risks as well. Commentary by Bruce Schneier.
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Cutting-edge data mining and other intelligence tools could redefine privacy as we know it. A News.com special report.
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Facebook.com, the No. 2 U.S.  social network site that is quickly expanding beyond its  college student base, has been met with a sudden privacy  backlash by users after it made design changes this week.
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Facebook's advertising system provokes questions about how companies share data.