Facebook Applications and Privacy
Facebook applications violate your privacy. This is not a surprise to many of you who have been around the block a time or two, and I know several people who refuse to enable any Facebook applications because of this concern. However, there is a point which I do not think has been made enough, and that is the following:
You do not have to install a Facebook application for it to learn about you. In fact, it is a virtual certainty that all of the large applications on Facebook, such as Farmville or Mafia Wars, can almost access anything about you that your friends can access, such as photos, your phone number, your birthday, and your interests. This is in spite of the fact that you might have restricted all access to items in your profile to friends or friends of friends. Think about it: If any of your friends has installed a nefarious application (like Farmville Gifts), that application can access your information by default.
Why does this happen? Facebook’s security model distinguishes between access by real people and access by applications. It is obviously handy for Facebook to allow applications to know who a person’s friends are — this way, you can easily invite friends to enable the application from within the application itself. However, by default, a lot of your information is accessible at any time to any application that any of your friends use. This includes
- Personal info (activities, interests, etc.)
- Status updates
- Online presence
- Website
- Education and work
- My videos
- My links
- My notes
- My photos
- Photos and videos of me
- About me
- My birthday
- My hometown
Consider it: Anybody (including somebody who knows who you are) can create a fake application and convince ANY of your friends to install it, and your information is available to them. The recent privacy hoopla about Google Buzz seems minor in comparison.
I encourage you to disable applications’ access to your information through your friends.
