What Does Facebook Reveal About You?
Facebook privacy has been in the news lately with many users thinking that the privacy settings on the site are too darn complicated, and also hidden deep inside the settings.
As a result information may be publicly available which users may have no intention to share with the world.
Facebook itself is not really helpful when it comes to information that they share about a specific user. That user could take a day off and poke around in the vast and extensive settings that affect a user's privacy, but that's not really a practical thing to do.
A better approach is to request all data from Facebook's new api to see which information are revealed about a specific Facebook user.
What does Facebook publish about you and your friends is such an online service. All it takes is to enter a Facebook username, name, email address or keywords to display information about that user directly on the service's page.
It will display the user's name, profile picture and other information if they are publicly available. This includes friends, family, events, activities, posts, notes, likes and more.
The tool is pretty handy as it reveals which information is shared publicly with anyone who uses the api to retrieve user information.
Users who notice that information are publicly available might want to check their Facebook privacy settings to block those information.
Update: The service is not available anymore and we are not aware of a related service right now that can display the same information.
You could however run a manual search to find out what Facebook reveals about you. First, open your profile page on Facebook using a different browser to simulate guest access to the page.
All information presented on it are publicly available. You may modify the information to add or remove data from the page.
Please note that other data may be accessible via apis that is not directly displayed on the public profile page. It is therefore suggested to go through all privacy settings on Facebook, and modify them to block any data from being leaked that you don't want out there in the open.
Another alternative is to find out what Facebook knows about you, and go from there.
Are you sure this tool works?
I’ve tried a whole bunch of my FB friends (especially those of whom I know couldn’t care less about their privacy) and I couldn’t find much info.
Everyone’s profile picture was visible.
Most people’s likes were visible.
And some people’s posts were visible.
That’s it. Most other links gave me “data (empty)” and some gave me an unclear error message.
Does anyone have other results?