A social networking privacy experiment

All too often, people forget to secure their facebook profile page and then post stupid self deprecating comments that site can easily scoop up and archive forever. This may be a good time for you to read my post on securing your Social Media information found here.

We Know What You’re Doing is the brainchild of an 18 year old web programmer who wanted to show the world just how stupid people can be. Using the publicly available Graph API, his site collects interesting updates and categorizes them into one of these categories:

• Who wants to get fired?
• Who's hungover?
• Who's taking drugs?
• Who's got a new phone number?

 

Click on the above image to maximize it.

Why should you worry?

Governments and companies datamine these sources of public information using techniques called Open Source Intelligence. Since it is based on publicly available information, they don't really need your permission and you would be surprised at how much information can be gleamed by a trained analyst.

My advise to you is simple, if you wouldnt want your husband/wife/mother to know about it, don't post it on the internet because the internet never forgets.