On Social Networks, You Are Who You Know 171
santosh maharshi writes "On social networks like Facebook, even if you have kept your profile very private, people can just look at your friends list and infer lots of vital information about you. Most of the social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn allow people to see your picture and your friends list as part of the open access for visitors (the article says that only 5% of Facebook users have bothered to hide their friends list). In a study titled You Are Who You Know: Inferring User Profiles in Online Social Networks (PDF), conducted by Alan Mislove of Northeastern University and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, an algorithm was tested that can accurately infer the personal attributes of Facebook users simply by looking at their friend lists. 'At Rice [University], the algorithm accurately predicted the correct dormitory, graduation year, and area of study for the many of the students. In fact, among these undergraduates, researchers found that “with as little as 20 percent of the users providing attributes we can often infer the attributes for the remaining users with over 80 percent accuracy."'"
Kick it up a notch: spokeo.com (Score:5, Informative)
Friends are now always public - nasty facebook. (Score:3, Informative)
Facebook has now changed their policy to eliminate privacy, in particular, friend lists are always public [facebook.com]. At one time you could make this private, as noted in this report. I made my own friend list private when I first joined it, but Facebook now ignores my configuration. If you can make friend lists private, please let know how... it sure isn't easy, and Facebook's current documentation says that it cannot be made private.
Making public the private data you gave a company, without your consent, should be illegal.... but it appears that Facebook can do it with impunity. I've mostly stopped using Facebook because Facebook seems to be becoming actively hostile to privacy of any kind.
Re:It could go a lot deeper (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Friends are now always public - nasty facebook. (Score:1, Informative)
you gave them all that data and your consent to do whatever they wanted with it.
Next time you are about to tick the "I have read and agree to the terms and conditions" box, I suggest actually reading it...
Re:You have friends (Score:4, Informative)
It does. Historically used in *actual* letters. Google results are a-plenty, and even mentioned in the first paragraph here LOL [wikipedia.org]:
It's amazing how easily people forget that things existed before the Internet...