Openbook

Sunday, May 23rd, 2010 (No comments yet)

Here's another great tool for understanding Facebook privacy and security. Openbook uses the programming interface that Facebook provided to the public to create a keyword search engine for Facebook.

This allows you to easily find information that many people thought was private, but wasn't. For example, this handy list of people who've cheated on their husbands:

Did this person mean to publicly declare their sexual orientation. Did that person intend to announce to the whole world that their HIV test came back positive? Do some searches of your own to find out just how easy it is to find your personal information on Facebook if you don't properly secure it (which they make pretty hard to do).

Their stated goal: "Our goal is to get Facebook to restore the privacy of this information, so that this website and others like it no longer work."

And their advertising policy: "Thanks for the offer but we're not interested in running ads at this stage. We're making a statement about the awful state of privacy on Facebook and we don't want anything to detract from that message."

This site is doing everything right. I have more respect for what they're doing and how they're doing it than I can say. For now, the only support I can give them is to promote them, but that's exactly what I intend to do! Please visit them and share them with others.

And if you happen to find something of yours or your friends' on there that shouldn't be, be sure to check out Reclaim Privacy.

You can visit them here: http://youropenbook.org/