But if you make a point to keep that kind of information private, this shadow profile business will sting. Now, the Facebook shadow profiles contain information that many people make public anyways plenty of people have made their phone numbers and addresses discoverable via a simple Google Search (not that they should, but that’s another story). When people use Facebook, they may store and share information about you and others that they have, such as when they upload and manage their invites and contacts.”
“We receive information about you from your friends and others, such as when they upload your contact information, post a photo of you, tag you in a photo or status update, or at a location, or add you to a group. To Facebook’s credit, they do make this clear in the privacy policy, it’s just that no one bothers to read it:
Now we don’t just need to worry about what we choose to share we also have to worry that the friends we trust with personal information will use programs that collect our data. The reason people are disturbed by shadow profiles is the information was collected in a roundabout way, and users had no control over what was collected (which is how even people who abstain from Facebook may have ended up with dossiers despite their reluctance to get involved with the site). Most people understand that Facebook can see, archive, and data-mine the details you voluntarily put up on the site. The shadow profile will live another day. And it illustrates that Facebook isn’t apologizing for collecting information – it’s just apologizing for the bug. Though the decision to publicly own up to the bug was a step in the right direction, this leak is disturbing because it illustrates just how little control we have over our data when we use services like Facebook. Since it actually takes moral fortitude to resist the social pull of Facebook, this is a slap in the face for people who make a point to stay off the network: The group claimed that Facebook still has profiles for non-Facebookers anyway. In 2011, an Irish advocacy group filed a complaint against Facebook for collecting information like email addresses, phone numbers, work details, and other data to create shadow profiles for people who don’t use the service.
This snafu won’t come as a surprise to researchers who brought up Facebook’s shadow profiles long before this most recent breach. And researchers looking at the numbers say the breach is actually more involved than Facebook initially claimed, with four pieces of data released for a user that Facebook said had one piece of data leaked. So, if I downloaded my information and was affected by the bug, I’d see some of the email addresses and phone numbers of my friends who did not make that information public.Īlthough Facebook corrected the bug, it hasn’t stopped this program of accumulating extra information on people.
Facebook photo privacy 2013 download#
Some people who use Facebook’s Download Your Information (DYI) tool could see the dossiers Facebook had been collecting as well as information their friends put up themselves. Their mea culpa was not particularly well-received, since this security breach revealed that the social network had been collecting this data on all of its users and compiling it into shadow profiles for years. “When people use Facebook, they may store and share information about you.”įacebook recently announced that it fixed a bug that inadvertently revealed this hidden contact information for six million users.
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