Facebook is entering the location-sharing game to compete with the likes of Foursquare, meaning you can now add your location to the list of things you’re oversharing. But as with all Facebook features, the devil is in the details. Because Facebook wants to do more than just let you check into a location. They want to let your friends check you into locations, by tagging you. Sound confusing? This is how it works:
You go with your friend to a particular Starbucks. Your friend wants all her friends to know she’s at that particular Starbucks. So she “checks in” thereby broadcasting her whereabouts. But your friend can also check you in by tagging you so everyone knows that you’re at that Starbucks with her. Although, really, you don’t even have to be there, for that to happen. You are, however, notified if you’ve been checked in somewhere.
There are a number of reasons why this could be a very bad thing, but the biggest is this: you let everyone know where you are (and where you’re not).
Personal information on 100 million Facebook users has been scraped from the social media site and is being shared and download as a single file via what is called a Bittorrent. BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing protocol used for distributing large amounts of data.
Facebook takes on the issue is the data that was scraped wasn’t private at all. To a degree, I agree. The data is being shared through the site, it’s already public.
Here’s how it went down: a good guy hacker developed a program that went through all 500 million profiles and was able to skim (scrape) all the data from Facebook that wasn’t locked down via the users Facebook privacy settings. Basically if you didn’t lock your privacy settings down, it’s now available in this file. If you lock down your settings today, it’s still in this file.
What’s the point? Hackers like to tinker, and some like to make a point.