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'We Know What You're Doing.' Revealing Facebook Statuses Publicly Collected And Exposed

Privacy concerns have always been rather synonymous with the social era of the internet, and the rather appropriately named WeKnowWhatYoureDoing.com is probably not going to help the situation.  Revealing Facebook statuses from random people are collected and publicly displayed for the world to see.

Demonstrating both the rather concerning 'openness' of Facebook's Graph API, the downright stupidity of people and their lack of care of personal data on the social network, this site searches through the millions of public Facebook updates for mentions of particular keywords and discussion surrounding certain topics.  The four streams of statuses created by Callum Haywood is use of the term "hate my boss," discussion of having a hangover, taking drugs, and announcing your new phone number.

While this does seem rather sketchy in terms of invasion of one's privacy; but they have opted into this service already.  With the somewhat large disconnect between account privacy settings and just what's available through public APIs, it makes for a more visual display of the kinds of statuses that get people fired or overwhelmed with cellphone stalkers.

It makes for an interesting, sometimes funny, and overall rather scary display of people's personal discussion, which demonstrates a lack of understanding about the disconnect between conversation in physical public places and the amplification of social media.  

Simply put, people have always been used to having personal conversations within a public space and have it stay private to them; but social media eliminates acts more like a forum, which is fully public by default.  A function which most people haven't quite grasped the extent of. 

So until something is done, both by Facebook themselves to keep social graph data more personal to the person, and the person...to simply stop sharing personal data, I guess we'll know what you're doing.

Source: We Know What You're Doing

Jason England