

Searching Facebook drives home the privacy degradation problem - rictic
http://willmoffat.github.com/FacebookSearch/

======
snewe
Unless we assume that these people are completely ignorant of the public
nature of their status updates, then this isn't a privacy violation. Is the
argument that Facebook defaults to public and makes it confusing to change
settings?

~~~
rmc
Initially Facebook was private by default. It's only recently that it's
changed to 'default public'. Lots of people are using a public thing, when it
used to be private. It's the change that's the most important thing.

~~~
0nly1ife
edit: double post

------
Rabidgremlin
I cobbled this together last night. It's very ugly but shows what get's
leaked: <http://www.rabidgremlin.com/fbprivacy/>

~~~
jdunck
Hey, I was thinking of doing something like this. If you're interested in
collaborating, let me know.

------
rictic
Inspired by <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1341236> (Why in the world
does Facebook let me do this?)

------
elbenshira
Interestingly, most of the results of "playing hooky" are females. If I were a
psychologist, I'd be thrilled about Facebook's idiotic privacy breeches.

~~~
kraynar
I noticed that too. I don't think it's necessarily a sign that females are
more likely to shirk responsibility. Maybe just that guys are less likely to
call it "playing hooky".

------
varenc
Twitter has it too: <http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%22playing+hooky%22>

I wrote a paper in grad school about people leaking info on twitter
unwittingly, and finding it using queries like these.
<http://varenhor.st/papers/tweetshow.pdf>

------
fezme
It's important to note that no one can 'stalk' you using this feature if they
aren't your friend - you can't search by name, only content. Unless there is
personally identifiable information about the person in the post itself (e.g.
"I'm John Doe and I hate my boss Bob Smith") the odds are you'll never be able
to find information about the person you are looking for. If you search for
"rectal exam" (<http://willmoffat.github.com/FacebookSearch/?q=rectal%20exam>)
and you happen to know Groten Nils, well, that's pretty embarrassing.

------
dschobel
<http://twitter.com/#search?q=hooky>

I know it's trendy to hate FB right now but don't underestimate the ignorance
factor in all of this.

~~~
bloodnok
True, but also consider how those two sites evolved. When I post a tweet, I
know that it is essentially the same as me taking out an ad in the paper or
shouting it at people in the pub. I'm fairly careful with regards to what I
post. When I started using Facebook, it was very much about communicating with
the group of people you have approved as friends. Over time it has transformed
into something much more public, I believe without the bulk of the userbase
realising.

------
nikolayav
The same tool is available on Facebook itself. Type a query in the bar at the
top of the page, click on More Results, choose Posts by Everyone from the
filter on the left.

~~~
jondoh
Exactly! I was going to say these folks better expect a buyout offer for their
amazing real-time search tool until I realized that what it offers has been
available on Facebook itself for a while, and nobody cares. I don't mean
nobody cares that people's posts are public. I mean, nobody cares to search
people's posts because doing so is NOT USEFUL.

Ironic how it appears that the catalyst for what people are calling Facebook's
privacy violation was the tech media's echo chamber screaming "real-time
search." Yes, take the current over-hyped BS (Twitter), combine it with
yesterday's insanely successful business (Google), and that is the direction
things must go in. And Facebook would be wise to get on board with the
inevitable or risk loosing everything. But if they overdo it and sneakily
encourage their users to act like attention hungry Twitter users (aka
journalists), then they risk loosing everything via a backlash from violated
users. Oh, and we're still waiting for either them or Twitter or Google to
make bazillions with real-time search because won't that just be so amazing.

...right. I suppose that dismissing this concept now could be a bit premature,
but, come on. It's been around for a while and has gone nowhere. Maybe when
Facebook realizes that there's no money in this real-time search nonsense,
they'll default everyone back to private. Of course, then the story will be
that they rudely interrupted their attention hungry users' abilities to act
like exhibitionists. And that is why Twitter will always have an edge.

------
aristoxenus
Point taken, but what's with the collateral damage? Search for something
that's not going to ruin people's lives. FB has a problem. You outing these
people on the web isn't helping anything.

If you wanted to be classy, you'd leave out the names and/or put rectangles
over their eyes. As it is now, you're at least as much an asshole as
Zuckerberg.

~~~
rictic
We briefly added these measures, but after thinking it over we've decided to
disable them.

From a technical standpoint they're a fig leaf. This isn't a complex server-
side app, it's a minimal UI on top of the JSON results Facebook returns for
these searches:
[http://graph.facebook.com/search?q=control+urges&type=po...](http://graph.facebook.com/search?q=control+urges&type=post)
. This is frankly the least scary use of this data. For example, it would be
trivial to start crawling this data and building your own indices to enable
far more invasive searches.

Our goal is to draw attention to this so that people become outraged and
Facebook changes their privacy settings. The security community has been
having this conversation for a while (more info:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_disclosure> ) and the only reason not to
disclose a security or privacy problem is to give the company involved time
and resources to fix the system.

This is not the case here. Facebook made this privacy-affecting change quite
deliberately, and I think it's clear that they did so with full knowledge of
the implications. If there is not an outcry, this will not be fixed. Right
now, from Facebook's perspective, the system is working as intended. The
longer it stays this way the worse the privacy breach becomes.

~~~
hamstersoup
Here's an example of the fig leaf in action:
[http://willmoffat.github.com/FacebookSearch/?q=HIV%20test...](http://willmoffat.github.com/FacebookSearch/?q=HIV%20test&classy=1)

We decided the redactions reduce the impact without actually offering any
privacy at all. (That's up to Facebook and the users).

~~~
aristoxenus
"Full disclosure" is a discussion about the ethics of publishing an exploit.
Publishing exploits is customarily done in a descriptive manner -- I've never
seen it done by publicly sharing the spoils of using that exploit.

Did you try publicizing it without the full identifying data available and
measuring the response? Did you consider a strategy of escalating
outrageousness, instead of going straight for this course of action?

What about automatically contacting the affected users first, and attempt to
rouse them to action?

I'm sorry to be so harsh in a public forum, but when someone takes it upon
himself to say that the affected lives are going to suffer for a good cause,
then he'd better accompany the resulting campaign with a very thorough -- and
thoroughly-vetted -- piece of argument explaining exactly why the ethical
balance is in his favor. Two guys deciding they'd get more pageviews by going
with plan A, and leaving the moral debate for blog commenters after the fact
is not a thorough vetting.

There were already numerous forces at play which could potentially result in
FB getting things straight. Your app won't have accomplished anything that
wouldn't otherwise have been accomplished, except perhaps to cause a few more
people to suffer.

~~~
rmc
> What about automatically contacting the affected users first, and attempt to
> rouse them to action?

You mean contacting 98% of facebook's users?!?

