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Sorry to interrupt you attempting to set you Facebook privacy settings, but I have to tell you something. I’ve got me a new blog over at Gartner. You can get all my rambling goodness on identity management related stuff over there. As for the rants about privacy, they are likely going to stay here, but you never can tell. Also, I am thinking of building a new version of Privacy Mirror to use the graph API. Any one have feature requests? I was looking at some local news on Washington Post’s website. I happen to notice that there in the right gutter along with miscellaneous ads which my brain filters out of my awareness, was a blue box. In the blue box was a list of things my Facebook friends have “liked” on WaPo recently. And this took me by surprise. I opened a different browser and headed to Facebook. First, I checked my Application Settings to see if a Washington Post application had slipped into my profile. I had this happen – Gizmodo and some other sites appeared in my authorized application list without getting my authorization. See this article for more. There was no Washington Post application. Next up, I checked my Privacy Settings to verify once more that I disabled Instant Personalization. And yes, that was still the case. So, wtf? I clicked on the big red X that WaPo had so kindly put in the blue box with my friends activities. Instead of removing the widget, it brought me to my Washington Post account. (At some point, I registered an account with the Post so I could actually read what they wrote – I know, crazy eh?) And there was a setting called Network News. Sure enough I was opt’ed in to that. This Network News setting enabled the Facebook social activity widget to appear on the pages I saw. A few Facebook hacks came across my desk this week. The first set are so called “rogue” applications which do the tediously predictable grab of user information followed by the equally tediously predictable spam-a-palooza. Calling such applications “rogue” is misleading. These didn’t start out okay and turn evil somewhere along the way. These apps were built to cause trouble – they are malware. Facebook has a healthy set of malware apps and the number is growing every day. You can easily spot effected Facebook users by their status messages – “Sorry for the email – my Facebook got a virus.” The second hack is of a far more interesting class. Ronen Zilberman, a security researcher, harnessed features of the Facebook platform to unwittingly perform a man-in-the-middle attack on itself. Zilberman documents how the attack works in very clear language. You can even see a video of the attack in action. Why is this a more interesting class of attack on Facebook? First, it doesn’t require an application to be added to the victim’s Facebook profile. Second and more importantly, this attack fundamentally turns Facebook’s goals against itself. Facebook’s mission is to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Its business is to accomplish this mission before someone else does. This requires that Facebook provide a means to connect as many people, websites and services as possible and as fast as possible. And in the course of this social networking land-grab, it is not surprising that we have seen both Facebook malware and the Facebook’s platform being used to support anti-social behavior. The Facebook platform is optimized to provide frictionless connections and sharing of information. But as exploits for ill-purposes increase, Facebook has to act and act in a manner counter to their mission. Over the last two weeks, I have been using my homegrown Facebook application, Privacy Mirror, as a means of experimenting with Facebook’s privacy settings. Although Facebook provides a nice interface to view your profile through your friends’ eyes, it does not do the same for applications. I built Privacy Mirror with the hopes of learning what 3rd party application developers can see of my profile by way of my friends’ use of applications. I have yet to speak with representatives of Facebook to confirm my findings, but I am confident in the following findings. Imagine that Alice and Bob are friends in Facebook. Alice decides to add a new application, called App X, to her profile in Facebook. (For clarity’s sake, by “add”, I mean that she authorizes the application to see her profile. Examples of Facebook applications include Polls, Friend Wheel, Movies, etc.) At this point, App X can see information in Alice’s profile. App X can also see that Alice is friends with Bob; in fact, App X can see information in Bob’s profile. Bob can limit how much information about him is available to applications that his friends add to their profiles through the Application Privacy settings. In this case, let’s imaging that Bob has only allowed 3rd party applications to see his profile picture and profile status. |
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