Security & Privacy + Software & Apps

Facebook is currently the most popular social networking site on the Internet. With the ability to find friends, communicate with them, and play games, the site can be addictive. But the BBC’s program Click this week showed that your personal information – the information in your Facebook profile – can be harvested easily by applications you choose to add to your profile.

It turns out that when you allow an application to access your personal information – something that many applications require – that application can get at not only your information, but that of your friends, without their knowing it, and in spite of their security settings.

The Click team created a simple application that could masquerade as a game or a test.

“We wrote an evil data mining application called Miner, which, if we wanted, could masquerade as a game, a test, or a joke of the day. It took us less than three hours.

But whatever it looks like, in the background, it is collecting personal details, and those of the users’ friends, and e-mailing them out of Facebook, to our inbox.

When you add an application, unless you say otherwise, it is given access to most of the information in your profile. That includes information you have on your friends even if they think they have tight security settings.

Did you know that you were responsible for other people’s security?”

The solution? Alas, there is none for no. The only thing you can do is make sure that you don’t include, in your Facebook profile, information that you don’t want non-friends to find out about. Or, as the Click team says, “In fact, the only way we can see of completely protecting yourself from applications skimming information about you and your friends is to erase all the applications on your profile and opt to not use any applications in the future.”

To learn more about this, watch this segment of Click on the program’s website.