Field Notes

Swedish media reports today that facebook has suffered a leak. 100 million accounts had their information taken and made public. The article even goes so far as to talk about an “attack” being made on facebook. So let get the facts straight. The information was public to begin with, the was no attack and no leak, just a collection of information that may have been accidentally made public, by facebooks users. So in essence, the detailed information that was “leaked” was public from the start.  Classic media hype.

The issue is that Facebook has a tendecy of changing around things, and that can cause confusion. In their recent (Dec 2009) change of privacy settings they made the odd decision that if you did nothing, your account was insecure. A pretty poor design in my opinion, but not a security leak like the article makes it out to be.

Here is the detailed report from Electronic Frontier Foundation about what the changes were and what the significance of them are.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/facebooks-new-privacy-changes-good-bad-and-ugly

Facebook, like all things popular, is a lot of different things for different people. It can be a social platform to keep in touch with your friends, a way to keep tabs on family and collegues, or even to find a job. However lets all agree that facebook was never meant for confidential information. Do you remember when Danish troops used facebook to plan operations in afghanistan? or when Israel did the same for an operation in Pakistan? Pretty extreme examples, but the point should be rather obvious:

If you don’t want to share it, don’t post it on facebook!

Link to the swedish article: http://www.dn.se/nyheter/varlden/facebookanvandares-personliga-information-utlackt-pa-natet-1.1145464