We then moved on to discussing his profile, which he insists is “private” and “locked”, and bosses and people outside his immediate social network (people he had granted access to, he said) would not have access to anything he has written on his own Facebook Wall, or on his photos, etc.

I’ve had several of these conversations with several people in the last few weeks, all of whom had insisted that Facebook, when locked, is completely private, and that is why they do not add colleagues, bosses, acquaintances, business contacts, etc., as they would like to maintain some semblance of privacy.

Now, that is extremely interesting, because yesterday, on Read Write Web, I saw the following article:

What Facebook Knows About You

The Northern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has put together a campaign to raise awareness of privacy issues surrounding Facebook applications, in particular quizzes. According to this group, the millions of Facebook users taking quizzes are revealing far more personal information to application developers than they are aware of. This is mostly due to the fact that Facebook’s default privacy settings allow access to all your profile information whether or not your profile is set to “private.” Even worse, the ACLU reports that even if you shun quizzes yourself, your profile info is revealed when one of your friends takes a quiz.

(Read the rest of the article)

I was curious, so I took ACLU’s quiz and yes, I risked all of your personal information (all 1,127 of you) to bring you this blog entry.

Here’s what the quiz showed me:

(Please click on the thumbnails for larger images)

While I am a huge advocate of building networks on Facebook and of users’ rights to privacy, I am not surprised with this news. So it really all just boils down to the fact that whatever you do on the internet, somebody out there is watching you. Nothing is private anymore.

As someone who works in the Social Media space, I was aware that Facebook quizzes are being used to collect data about users (what did you naively think those quizzes were for), but what I was not aware of was the extent to which this was being done. I have yet to create a Facebook application for work purposes, but the idea has definitely crossed my mind.

It will be interesting to see how Facebook deals with this, as more and more people become aware of what sort of user information Facebook passes on to application developer companies and their clients.

On Facebook’s end, they have protected their own interests by including this clause in an opt-in exercise before you add any application:

While Facebook insists that you can limit who has access to what information, and what kind of information applications are allowed to obtain from your profile by restricting access through Settings » Privacy Settings » Applications, many users may still not be aware of this issue or these options, and let’s face it, probably 9 out of 10 of you love doing Facebook quizzes in your free time.

Even if you don’t do quizzes, the article says that you are not exempt from this problem – quizzes and other applications can still obtain access to your information if your friends partake in these Facebook activities. For now, I suppose the only option would be to protect yourself by disallowing applications’ access to any of your information whatsoever, at Settings » Privacy Settings » Applications! Even so, do bear in mind:

If it is something your grandmother would frown upon, it probably should not be posted on any social networking site at all.

So do you still think Facebook is a safe and private haven for you to write and post whatever you want?