More evidence that privacy settings are important in social media

I just finished reading an article on Mashable about a site that aggregates publicly shared messages from Facebook that contain specific keywords relating to hating one's boss, hangovers, and phone numbers. The author of the article equates this to eavesdropping on a private conversation. The plain truth however is that through a lack of understand of the privacy settings on Facebook, people are broadcasting potentially damaging messages that can be picked up by anyone who has access to the the Facebook API.

These posts are out there to be culled from the public messages through the use of a simple url, the structure of which can be seen, along with the public posts at http://weknowwhatyouredoing.com/. 

All that you need to do in order to monitor specific terms in public messages via the url is to modify  the query. For instance, to get public messages that contain the word Wyoming, all that is needed is to change the "q=" value to Wyoming, and making sure that the locale is "en_US" (obviously US English). Here is an example of what that query returns: https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=wyoming&type=post&locale=en_US .

Wow. That is powerful and potentially scary.

Have a look at the About This Tool page on the site for more on the rationale. I believe that this site serves the purpose of reminding us how easily our private posts in any social networking site can be monitored if we do not take steps to protect our privacy.