Five things Facebook knows that you would probably rather it didn't

32 facebook-privacy big.jpgAn interview with an anonymous Facebook employee on blogsite The Rumpus confirms that yes, Facebook knows exactly who you are stalking and when where you’re clicking and yes it does store all that information. Permanently. It’s a good read but sobering to know for definite just how much Facebooks knows and stores.

The full interview is here, and not all the information is new but a few jump-out statements included:

1. Facebook saves stuff that has been deleted or untagged: that drunken status you deleted when you woke up is still on a server somewhere.

2. Facebook saves your viewing history, it has a log of clicks and so it knows whose pictures you’ve been going through

3. Facebook logs stats like how often you interact with or click on the profile of a given person and makes judgements about how good friends you are with them (you can see this when you start to type a friend’s name into the search box – the results are no longer ordered alphabetically, but by the people you have interacted with the most).

4. Facebook employees can find out any message you’ve sent or detail of your browsing history – ever – simply by querying the server where all this information is stored.

5. Instead of simply relying on trial and error to test out new features, Facebook now do psychological tests on new features, including tracking people’s eyes as they scan the screen.

Enough already, I think you get the gist.

[via Boing Boing]

Anna Leach

5 comments

  • Naïvety rules! I hope one day every deleted status and private message becomes public.. that would be so awesome!

    I’ll even chip in 50 euros to the Russian hackers that will make this happen.

  • Is this really surprising to anyone? Of course, it shouldn’t be. And why target Facebook in particular?

    Anywhere you login and do stuff, you should just assume that your activities, messages, etc are being logged. It’s not hard to do, and if the site is well run, they’re going to want to capture that data so they can improve their bottom line.

  • The first four only matter if / when they’re trying to sell that stuff. Your drunken posts? Not so much.

    The fifth one can only be done if you have a focus group come in to test it, which gazillions of people designing websites do every single year. It’s not a psychological test, it’s usability testing, a bloody good idea if you don’t want a site that looks like it’s been hacked together by gibbons.

  • Since most people on Facebook never leave the site, neglecting the entire rest of the whole internet, you should post this somewhere they’ll see it.

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