Fresh security fears for Facebook users

THE revelation that a security consultant collected the names and profile URLs for 171 million Facebook accounts from publicly available information has yet again raised concerns about what is private and what is not private on the world’s most popular social networking site.

Ron Bowes, the consultant who collected the accounts, uploaded the data as a torrent file, allowing anyone with a computer connection to download the data.

Facebook says no data was “stolen,” the site was not hacked, and that this is how the site is supposed to work.

At the same time, users are more than a bit perturbed that, because of this document, they’ll probably be exposed to more spam and more malicious phishing attempts to try to obtain their login information and other personal data.

So what really is private on Facebook? What data is safe and what isn’t? For starters, the company is right: Your name and the fact that you have a Facebook page are, by and large, unprotected from the rest of the web.

As Facebook notes in its privacy policy: “Such information may, for example, be accessed by everyone on the internet (including people not logged into Facebook), be indexed by third-party search engines, and be imported, exported, distributed, and redistributed by us and others without privacy limitations.

“Such information may also be associated with you, including your name and profile picture, even outside of Facebook, such as on public search engines and when you visit other sites on the internet.”

But more important, if you haven’t taken the time to manually update Facebook’s privacy settings, a lot more information than that is freely available online and subject to the same lack of restriction.

Anything you have marked as “everyone” in the Facebook privacy settings module is open to the world, and that can indeed be dangerous.

Facebook gives you a fair amount of control over your information, but it’s up to you to change the settings and restrict certain information more tightly than Facebook does by default.

That means your photos and wall posts may indeed by seen by the world unless you restrict their viewing to just Friends (or even Friends of Friends). Images may be indexed and archived by search engines, and they’re likely to be associated directly with your name.

The bottom line is the same as ever: If you don’t want something to be seen on Facebook, make absolutely sure your privacy settings are correct.

And, of course, the only way to truly keep something out of the hands of those you don’t want to have it is to make sure it never gets on the internet at all.

Simon Davies, a representative of the British-based privacy watchdog Privacy International, accused Facebook of negligence over the data mining technique, according to the BBC. Facebook, however, said Bowes’s actions haven’t exposed anything new since all the information Bowes collected was already public.