Openbook highlights public information on Facebook

by Steve Ragan - May 18 2010, 08:00

Using the API Facebook makes available to developers, Openbook will display wall posts on Facebook that are in the public domain. The site serves as both an interesting look into the personal lives of others, while at the same time demonstrating the need for privacy.

Facebook has not had a good month. For that matter, while May has been bad, most of 2010 hasn’t been easy either. Among some of the issues the social networking giant has had to contend with are notification emails that included the IP address of the person who triggered the alert. For example, if a friend posted something to your wall or sent you a personal message, their IP address was in the email headers encoded with a Base64 string.

Then there was the issue with Facebook Chat, where you could view your friend's live IM sessions or view pending friend requests. The glitch that allowed you to see who a friend was talking to in real-time was caused by the preview function introduced by Facebook as part of their updates to privacy controls. At the time, if you previewed your profile as one of your friends, it was possible to see pending friend notifications and their live chat sessions.

The fact that privacy controls led to a potential security problem, as well as the recent privacy changes when mixed with the “Like” feature, there have been reports on what appears to be a major backlash against Facebook. Yet, despite more than 3,000 pledges from people to delete their profiles over privacy concerns, the backlash appears to be held to a vocal minority.

According to Facebook, since the f8 conference last month, the site has gained 10 million more users. When it comes to account removal, they’ve seen nothing to show a mass exodus.

The frustration over privacy is two fold. The fact that Facebook seems to be content to alter the privacy settings at will and hand over information, and the fact that while they offer privacy controls, the mass majority of users have issues understanding and utilizing them all.

If you need an example of the data that can be found from Facebook, head over to Openbook (www.youropenbook.org). Openbook is a search site that allows you to view the wall posts that are intentionally or inadvertently made public by keyword, and if you are logged in to Facebook at the time you use it, you can follow the search results to the complete profile of the user. While the site might seem like a scary thing, it actually uses the Graph API Facebook makes available to developers.

The actual premise of Open book is to show everyone what it is that is available in the public. Since it’s launch on May 13, Openbook as earned more than 700,000 page views, and generated a good deal of buzz.

“We're very pleased that we're not the only ones who care about this. We're glad to raise awareness of the problem through Openbook. It's often a somewhat abstract problem to talk about, and it can be difficult to communicate why breaches of privacy are a serious concern,” Peter Burns, one of the Openbook developers told The Tech Herald recently.

The problem is privacy. Case in point, while poking about on Openbook, we noticed the public profile of a teen who was openly discussing her sexual conquests from the past weekend, as well as other social commentary you would expect to see from a college freshman. In addition to her wall posts and friends list, her public personal information made it easy to discover who she was.

We reached out to her, and as expected, while she knew that some of her posts might hurt her chances for a job down the line, she simply wasn’t thinking when she posted them. She also assumed her profile was private. To be fair, we helped her lock her profile down, and showed her how to delete what posts she wanted. The problem is, they could still exist in a cache somewhere online.

Yet, in this girl’s case, there was no privacy breach, especially if you look at it from Facebook’s point of view. She opted to leave this data public. It doesn’t matter if she understood that it wasn’t truly private. The tools were there to lock her profile down, and it was up to her to use them.

That scenario is exactly why many are taking issue with Facebook’s privacy stance. The rule is that if you want to keep your likes, personal information, wall posts, and images private, you need to opt-out of sharing them. The consensus is that if Facebook set things to where you had to opt-in to information sharing, then the issues they face now would be null and void.

“There's a ton of things that Google Buzz has done wrong from a privacy perspective, but one thing that they did exactly right I think was to place a marker right next to the "Post" button that indicated which audience you're about to publish to. If Facebook implemented similar measures, that would silence most of my objections,” Burns told us.

Considering the buzz Openbook has generated in their privacy awareness campaign, we asked Burns if the team was following the Facebook privacy debacle in the news and if they had any thought on it.

“They do not do a good job of indicating how public each piece of information you share on the site will be. Furthermore they change the rules far too often and always to make users' information less private and more public [1]. If you understood Facebook's privacy settings two years ago (or even six months ago) that information would be worse than useless with today's bewildering settings [2],” Burns told us.

“The second is an understanding that tools for working with information always and only become more powerful. Seemingly benign information today may be enough to reveal something embarrassing or hurtful about you tomorrow, either through better information technology or just the release of more information. This is why breaches of privacy are such a serious problem, and it's not an easy thing to get across to the man on the street.”

Burns added that Facebook's current attitude seems to be “that it's all right to change the policy so long as they also throw a metric ton of settings at the user in an out of the way part of the site. This works fine for advanced users, but it leaves a vast portion of users thinking that they're still communicating privately, and all the while they're posting their private thoughts for all the world to see.”

Around the Web