Be careful what you post on Facebook

Facebook is a pretty cool site. Around 400 million people use it to share videos and photos, talk with friends and family and play games. However, Facebook as an entity has shown a blatant disregard for the privacy of its end users. A new website called Openbook shows the pitfalls of Facebook privacy settings by making a search engine that shows what facebook users are posting in real time. As you can expect that with 400,000,000 users, some will mistakenly make some status updates that they’d rather keep private, but end up on the openbook search engine.

What a delightful specimin of humanity. I, for one, are glad that people like the above are our next generation of doctors, lawyers, teach… Oh wait. Never mind.

(On an unrelated note, the garbage she is talking about refers to where someone attached England flags to property that didn’t belong to them, and they were cut down and returned to the owner. Nothing as sensational as a blanket ban on the England flag.)

I… Uh… Don’t think that’s how politics works, dude.

Yeah, you probably shouldn’t post a status like that Eric. Especially with open privacy settings…

Whilst it’s almost inevitable that the likes of 4chan and other internet riff raff will use a tool like Openbook to get as many people fired from their jobs as possible, it serves a purpose to educate people that Facebook isn’t the best place to post ill informed diatribes or rants about your employer.

If anyone takes anything from this blog post, it’s that you should really, really make your Facebook privacy settings the most strict that you can (or even better, delete your facebook account). What you post on Facebook isn’t private. If you post something potentially embarassing on the site, and it becomes viral, there’s nothing you can do about it. Whenever you post a status update, or upload a photo, just think ‘is this a good idea?’

Food for thought, anyway.

Tags: england, england flag, facebook, facebook api, graph api, openbook