Backdoor for people to gain access to your private Facebook Photos

NCD News: Backdoor for people to gain access to your private Facebook Photos - 28.09.09

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Backdoor for people to gain access to your private Facebook Photos: There are many nightmares you have as a parent, but often, the fears you don't have are the nightmares you end up enduring. Certainly true for the parents who left their children at the Little Ted's nursery in Plymouth after a worker, Vanessa George, was arrested for child abuse and possessing indecent images of children - parents were told that they may have to help sift through the images to identify their children. We simply cannot imagine what that felt like.

The assumption is often that, where children are concerned, there are laws in place to prevent that sort of thing from happening. Right?

That seems to have been the assumption on the social networking website Facebook, where their front page boasts "Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life".

Indeed, if you search for Facebook on a search engine, the description states: "Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to keep up with friends ..." -- one would be forgiven, therefore, for taking this at face value and assuming that Facebook is indeed a place for you to keep up and share information with family, work colleagues and friends.

The depth of this "sharing" however is often far from the average user's understanding. Some recent news:

Facebook have been forced, via a class action lawsuit, to close down their Beacon advertising system which tracked all purchases made by users and shared that information with other users and third parties. People were not clearly informed of the tracking and the option to opt out was considered to be practically hidden.
They are facing a similar lawsuit in California where users have had their personal details, information and activities sold to third parties by Facebook. They state that there was no clarity on the website about how their information would be used.
The Canadian Federal Privacy Commissioner was the first to highlight the fact that Facebook terms and conditions state that they will keep all user information indefinitely - even after the user believes they have deleted their account.

Now, it has been revealed that their "privacy" measures for photos may also be misleading users.

As Facebook users will know, when you create an album you are faced with 4 choices in relation to who can view the photos to be placed there: Everyone, Friends of Friends, Only Friends or Customize.
Facebook options

If you believed that "Only Friends" implies that only your friends can view the images, and that if you set specific people to view the images using the Customize feature, that only they will be able to view those photographs -- such is not the case.

If one of your friends comments or tags a photo in a album that has this privacy setting, the album is then opened up for all of their friends to see. If any of their friends then commments or tags a photo then those friend's friends can view the album. If this is continually perpetual so that all Facebook users could essentially see your "private" photos we're unsure, but certainly it seems as though the "privacy" album settings are either badly programmed or deliberately misleading.

The first we heard about it, a mother was being contacted by a complete stranger making comments about photos of her two year old daughter - photos that were supposed to be in a private album marked "Only Friends". After discovering the problem she immediately deleted all the photos in her album.

But can you ever actually delete a photo from Facebook once it is uploaded? We created a Facebook account, uploaded photos, invited a few friends to comment on them and then attempted to delete the account. Whilst the account no longer shows up for access, some of the photos still appear in the activities sections of each of the friends that commented 3 months after account deletion.

Facebook is therefore not what-it-says-on-the-tin. Far from being a great resource for family, friends and co-workers to keep in touch - it is more like a gym locker with a broken lock and a door that keeps swinging open, spilling your underwear and embarrassing rash prescription out on to the floor whilst local businesses rummage through your wallet receipts to see if they should send you some ads through the post and a complete stranger leaves you disconcerting notes about how good your family photo looks.

We could therefore say, that people using Facebook need to accept that every provided "privacy" feature is a potential lie and that everything they do, everything they enter and everything they upload is being catalogued and shared with other users they don't know and companies they probably won't like. But we shouldn't have to say that - Facebook should be saying it on their front page until these relentless privacy problems are fixed.

The biggest question: whilst journalists catalogue the huge privacy invasion that is Facebook with all the lawsuits and government intervention - where is the public outcry? There has been no mass exodus from Facebook despite the continuing, daily news coverage of ongoing problems and privacy concerns.

If the pictures on your PC Desktop suddenly ended up in the hands of strangers, Microsoft's customer services team would be inundated with calls (and Mac sales would skyrocket). But then again, Facebook have no contact details visible anywhere on their site - and it seems people would rather give everyone in the world the opportunity to download pictures of their children than them have to actually go through the process of emailing those pictures to each relative one at a time. †