Facebook’s third-party developers know everything about you

Third-party developers, using Facebook’s published APIs, can gain access to nearly everything on your personal Facebook profile — no matter how your privacy settings are configured. You can learn about this in a disturbing post, “What Facebook Quizzes Know About You,” by Sarah Perez on ReadWriteWeb.

Sarah writes that the American Civil Liberties Union is demonstrating the power of Facebook’s APIs by the use of a simple Facebook quiz. Once you “take” the quiz, the ACLU’s computers have unfettered access to just about all your personal data on Facebook. The ACLU shows that info to you, to demonstrate how significant this problem is.

What’s more, writes Sarah,

The second question is even more disturbing. It informs you that everything on your profile is made available to the developers when your friends take a quiz. To drive this point home, the ACLU’s Quiz loads up information pulled from your friends’ profiles and displays that data below the answer for your perusal. Here, information on your friends is shown including hometowns, favorite books, political views, networks, birthdays, number of wall posts, and even personal photos. Thanks to the quiz, all that info which you can see on your friends’ profiles is now available to the quiz author, too.

As Sarah explains, Facebook does not screen third-party developers for trustworthiness, nor does it require them to conform with Facebook’s own privacy policy.

The ACLU’s recommendation: Pay very strict attention to your Facebook privacy settings, especially those that involve third-party applications.

Alan’s recommendation: Do not put anything on Facebook or any other social media service that you don’t want the entire world to know about. Always assume that everything that you put onto the Internet is available to everyone, at any time, forever.

(PS: Credit goes to my friend Steve Maller for pointing to Sarah’s post.)