Facebook’s latest privacy changes have opened up a loophole that could allow all someone with a list of email addresses to access private profile details. If you’re asking “how? why? and should I be worried?” read on…
The loophole revealed by blogger Max Klein, uses Facebook’s email look-up feature which scans email addresses in your contact list to see if they’re using the social network.
Klein revealed that someone with access to a list of email addresses, acquired legally or otherwise, could upload them to a dummy account and let users see profiles created using those addresses.
To get at Facebook profiles, the person with the email list would simply need to get hold of a widely available scraping tool which would grab details like names, pictures, locations, interests, photos and wall posts.
Though not all Facebook users leave that information visible, Facebook’s recent changes to privacy settings made name, current city, profile picture, gender, networks and your friends list impossible to make private.
Facebook’s new privacy settings do allow you to stop people finding you by name but if an outsider has your email address that can still get at the information Facebook considers public including pages your are a fan of.
Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes admitted to Wired: “If someone knows your email address, they can find you even if you’ve restricted search privacy.” Facebook says it is reducing the number of email addresses that users can run through its friend finder service and blocks users that add contacts at an unusually fast rate.
It’s also worth noting that the amount of information expose by the loophole is also revealed to third-party Facebook applications whenever you or one of your friends installs one. Still, at least we know Mark Zuckerberg’s downgraded his own privacy settings.
Do the loopholes in Facebook’s privacy settings worry you? Let us know.
Out now | £free | Facebook (via Wired Epicenter)
