Stalkbook: View any Facebook profile information even if they’re not your friend

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Whether you’re a graduate student looking for a job or a working professional, if you want to separate your career from your personal life, chances are you’ve carefully managed your Facebook privacy settings so that strangers can’t see your photos, logins, and other private information. However, even if you think you have everything under control, one web developer has found a way to bypass Facebook’s entire privacy system that will allow anyone to see your profile if you have mutual friends.

Aptly named Stalkbook, MIT graduate Oliver Yeh created a Facebook app that collects user data as a third-party developer via the Facebook API. This information can show Yeh the stranger’s personal information, which he can essentially use and share on Stalkbook. Yeh shares an example.

“With this API I can have access to my friend Trevor’s information. What Stalkbook does is it goes through all of the user’s data and all of the user’s friend data and stores a cached copy on the website, so that when someone else visits Stalkbook, they now have access to a cached version of Facebook’s data, even though they don’t have permission to access Trevor’s information ,” he explains to IEEE.

Simply put, the app works by impersonating you, the user, as your Facebook friend so that you can see the personal information of another profile that you are not friends with.

“So the photo version works whenever a person logs into the app; it not only exposes its information, but also compromises all of its friends’ information,” Yeh said. “If I log into the site, my friend Trevor would also be logged into the site because I’m friends with Trevor. And because with my credentials I can see Trevor’s information. Now, everyone on the Internet can also see Trevor’s information using my credentials.

“And as more and more people sign up to Stalkbook, you get this network effect, where you only need maybe 10 percent of Facebook to join to compromise 80 to 90 percent of Facebook.”

If this is still confusing, see the pictogram on the right. Basically, whenever someone logs into their Facebook account, all their friends’ data is compromised. Yeh noted that only likes, photo tags, comments and status updates will be visible, but not private messages.

Now that you understand how wild the concept is and are freaked out enough, take a seat. There are several factors that would prevent Stalkbook, which has not yet been published, from ever reaching a wide audience.

While it’s normal for developers to receive some user data to run their apps, it’s against Facebook’s terms of service to request information and login access to someone else. According to the rules for app developers, one guideline also states that a developer “shall not use, display, share, or transmit user data in a manner inconsistent with your privacy policy,” while another restricts developers from such actions by requiring them to “comply with all other restrictions contained in our Facebook Platform Policies.”

So there. In case you were planning to stalk your ex-lovers through mutual friends using Stalkbook, you might have to stick to the old-fashioned way of actually befriending them or getting your mutual friends to air the dirty stuff. But what Stalkbook shows is that navigating Facebook’s privacy settings isn’t as difficult as you might think, so whatever you end up sharing on Facebook will never be private.

Photo by Sandy Woodruff

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Source: newstars.edu.vn

Links: Stalkbook: View any Facebook profile information even if they’re not your friend – Tekmonk Bio, Stalkbook: View any Facebook profile information even if they’re not your friend – Kungfutv, Stalkbook: View any Facebook profile information even if they’re not your friend – Blogtomoney