Wednesday 26 June 2013

Facebook Knows More About You Than You Think

You know what the problem with Facebook is? They just don’t give out enough of my information. I mean, sure, they dish out all the stuff I put out “voluntarily”, but is that really enough?

Obviously they didn’t think so.


Last week, Facebook owned up to a bug that exposed the private information of more than six million users. Then, security researchers revealed that the private information contained data on many more users – even some that aren’t even on Facebook. These “shadow profiles” contained names, and even email addresses and phone numbers for millions of people.

Many of the users whose email addresses and phone numbers were exposed had not knowingly shared that personal information with Facebook.
Instead, their contact information had been collected on the sly — stored in Facebook's secret behind-the-scenes scaffolding, where it collects troves of data on you that you never knew about. That information comprises what's known as your "shadow profile."

Basically, when one of your friends had Facebook analyze his address book to find his friends, Facebook was gathering extra, unauthorized information including email addresses and phone numbers and then assigning that data secretly to the appropriate user. In this way, Facebook has data on you that you never actually authorized them to have.

Holy privacy violations, Batman!

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