Your Online Life Might be an Open Book
My friends Will Moffat and James Home, and their friend Peter Burns, created a site to highlight just how exposed your Facebook updates are: Openbook. It’s an interface to Facebook’s public search API, and the first thing you should probably do with it is search for a phrase from one of your recent status updates. If it shows up, change your privacy settings!
The purpose of the site is to pressure Facebook into making its privacy controls far simpler, which is a noble goal. The current system is so bad it’s been called out by the New York Times, among others, and over time the set of who can see things about you by default has expanded significantly.
They’ve done a great job of exposing this, resulting in quite a lot of publicity
It’s worth it to spread the word about this—otherwise, only the internet-savvy will protect their privacy, and Facebook will find it easier to get away with the exposure of your personal data.