Affinitive’s Social Media Playground

Recently, reports from the BBC and Washington Post have raised questions about the privacy implications of applications on Facebook, MySpace, and other sites. As usual in today's journalism, there is a bit of sensationalism, a little fear mongering, and a dose of misinformation tossed together with a few actual facts. In order to really understand what's going on, it's important to sort through the former to get to the later.

Facebook has an array of privacy settings. In fact, they may be too complicated, and most users probably don't pay attention to them. An application only has the permissions of the person using it, so if you install an application, by default, it can generally access all the information on your friends that you can. However, users can set the information available to applications their friends are using to be essentially nothing.

On MySpace, applications' access to information is even more restrictive; only the name and image of a user's friends who haven't added the application are available through the API, although for some reason age, gender, and location are listed in the settings which also allows users to completely block apps from accessing their information. A developer could actually get more information on users just by scraping publicly viewable pages than through the API.

The real area for concern is that when using a Facebook application, it can access everything about yourself that you can, which is almost everything. On MySpace, an application can get most of the profile information on users who have added it, but this information is usually already on a public page. Unscrupulous developers could then store this against the sites' policies and do what they want with it.

The bottom line is, if you don't want something to be known by the whole world, don't put it on a social networking site regardless of your settings. The only information required to register for Facebook is a name, email, and birthdate. On MySpace, it's this plus country and zip code. Everything else is voluntarily, as is using the sites themselves.

Social networks are amazing tools to communicate with friends and make new connections. They just have to be used with common sense and intelligence, things that seem to be missing in journalism.