Ok, so Facebook messed up once with Feeds. Facebook simply took all the fun out of stalking by collecting and revealing all kinds of users’ activity on the site. After enormous public outcry, Facebook rushed to release new set of privacy restrictions that users can modify in their accounts. Great. Problem fixed!

Such a negative impact should have never happened in the first place. Many wondered if they even bothered with a simple focus group or just blatantly rolled out this new feature without thinking about the consequences.

Anyways, now that this issue is behind us, Facebook strikes again!

Facebook Development Platform

The goal: “… enhance your ability to interact with people in your life in new and interesting ways.”
The price: almost everything Facebook knows about you

Facebook will allow developers to use their API to create a whole plethora of features, that yes indeed may help users like you and I interact with people in some creative ways. I, for one, am not willing to publicly disclose my information to any single developer out there. Today, there are simply way too many individuals with malicious intent and identities get stolen in record numbers.
To summarize, here’s the information that will be freely available to developers:

• your name
• your profile picture
• your gender
• your birthday
• your hometown location (city/state/country)
• your current location (city/state/country)
• your political view
• your activities
• your interests
• and a ton more…

The first one really surprised me, but in their defense, the do keep some information safe:

• your e-mail address
• personal website
• instant messenger ID
• telephone number
• street address

Great right? Wrong! Imagine this, a developer with a not-so-good intent finds your full name and your hometown. They go to any White Pages website online and do a simple search and BAM, they have your full address and home phone number, even if you originally never put that in your Facebook profile!

Remedy

Fortunately, Facebook learned their lesson the hard way last time, so they implemented a feature to let you keep your private information.. private:

• Click “My Privacy” on the left
• Click “Edit Settings” under the “Everyone” section
• Scroll down to the bottom and un-check “My information may be used according to the restricted Terms of Service.”

I guess anyone at your school can look up your full profile as it is. So it’s up to you to which extent you want to disclose information about your life on this site. But being a developer myself, I know how much code can simplify your life. In this case, a simple code that would collect a huge number of names, hometowns and other data and try to match that to the data available on White Pages.. automatically and within minutes.

In the end, the data that Facebook has on millions and millions of high school, college students and now professionals, is really really expensive in the world of online ad targeting. It will be interesting to see to which levels this company is prepared to go to squeeze out the most out of a dollar.

Check out the new Terms of Service for yourself. Pay close attention to section II.b:
» http://pitt.facebook.com/tos.php?user_tos