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Public Search Engines Mine Private Facebook Details


Another reason to be careful what you post on Facebook:
All it takes is a simple Google search, and phishers and marketers can glean a treasure trove of private information based on relationships among Facebook "friends," according to new research.

Researchers from the U.K.'s University of Cambridge recently published a paper (PDF) detailing a project in which they developed a software tool to correlate and map Facebook profiles they found via public search engines, such as Google, to build detailed maps of relationships among Facebook members.

"Knowing who a person's friends are is valuable information to marketers, employers, credit rating agencies, insurers, spammers, phishers, police, and intelligence agencies, but protecting the social graph is more difficult than protecting personal data," the researchers wrote in their paper. "Personal data privacy can be managed individually by users, while information about a user's place in the social graph can be revealed by any of the user's friends."

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Tags: engineering, facebook, identity, networking, social, theft

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XayOn Comment by XayOn on April 12, 2009 at 4:25pm
Shouldn't facebook use a proper robots.txt for preventing that? :-/ Worring
Anarchy Angel Comment by Anarchy Angel on April 6, 2009 at 4:56pm
LOL google searching everywhere, even places it shouldnt. thats googles new tag line.

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