I Bet I Can Find 1,000,000,000 People To Cough Up Their Privacy

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Someone won't friend you on Facebook and you want to stalk them, or maybe find out more personal info?

No problem. Due to Facebook's new "features", here's a clever way to gain access to their profile as if you were their friend!

There's been a lot of hoopla lately about Facebook's privacy term changes, but they've done another thing that's pretty unorthodox.

Perhaps you've noticed now you can no longer be a "fan" of a page; instead you can choose to "like" it, but that's not the only change. If you "like" something, according to Facebook, you now have a "connection" with that page, and the page appears to have access to your profile as if they were a friend.

So the new technique to gain access to someone's more personal information is to merely create a page that centers around some universally-agreeable topic and as soon as people "like" it, it appears to be as good as making someone a friend.

If you want to see for yourself, go to Profile in Facebook and "Edit Friends" and suddenly you will be pages listed as if they were friends.

Facebook undoubtedly gives you the ability to set more restrictive privacy levels for these groups, but by default, it all appears to be open.

The operative factor here is, every time there appears to be a Terms of Service, policy or "feature" change, it's reasonable to expect you'll have to wade through miles of configuration screens to restrict access you thought was limited to a small, carefully-selected group of friends.


 

This isn't true
Posted by Tim on 2010-05-10 05:06:22
Hi there, I manage a page with 6,000+ fans and I just checked: there are many fans of my page whose friend list I cannot see.

The "access to your profile" that the page has is the ability to publish stories to its wall, which then show up in your newsfeed. That's all. Beyond that, page administrators have the same level of access to your profile as any non-friend does... it comes back to your privacy settings.

Applications are a different story - they allow for much greater access to profiles.
Agree with Tim
Posted by Gina on 2010-05-14 09:29:07
I have a fan page for our org and there is no option to see non-friend profiles. In fact, when you click to see the pages of the people who liked/joined, it will show them as either on your regular list or give you an option to add them as a friend.

As Tim pointed out, third party applications have the ability to scope out personal information. The fan pages do not.
I also agree with Tim
Posted by Steve T on 2010-05-14 09:46:00
Tim is correct. The fan pages can't access yoyr info. The applications can.

But I'd love to know why no one in all the articles I've read(and not only on this site)have never mentioned Twitter's lack of privacy.

With Twitter you can set your tweets to private. No problem there.

They tell you your public tweets will be seen by the public which gave me the impression seen only by the public I choose. But Twitter doesn't tell you something.

That something is TWITTER'S PUBLIC TWEETS CAN BE FOUND IN GOOGLE SEARCH. Why? Twitter's public tweets should be seen only by the Twitter public. Why are they seen by the Google public? TALK ABOUT NO PRIVACY!
who cares
Posted by tdawg on 2010-06-07 22:54:12
facebook is lame anyway
Lame Faceplant Myface Twatface Teatface Tweetburger
Posted by ToggleSwitch on 2010-11-21 12:16:58
All social networking is: is a huge load of time-wasting, narcissistic, ego-self-stroking,
bullshit.
 

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