There has been a lot of uproar recently regarding online privacy, particularly when it comes to Facebook, yet people are still oblivious in terms of controlling their own privacy settings. A new Web site "experiment" called We Know What You're Doing seeks to teach a valuable lesson as to why privacy settings are so important.
Many people tend to foolishly share everything on Facebook, posting the updates publicly on the Web. An 18-year-old British Web developer seems to be more aware of the risks such public postings pose than many users twice his age. In his "experiment," Callum Haywood aims to prove how many ridiculous, absurd, and idiotic things people share - publicly, nonetheless - on Facebook.
The Web site uses Facebook's Graph APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and publicly available Foursquare check-ins to automatically generate streams of idiotic, vain, mean, and over-sharing lamentations from publicly available Facebook posts. We Know What You're Doing (WKWYD) breaks down these posts into four columns: Who Wants to Get Fired? (rants about bosses, jobs), Who's Hungover? (unsurprisingly, the longest column), Who's Taking Drugs? (it's amazing just how much people share), and Who's Got a New Phone Number? And because the site aims to expose such foolishness, each post includes the user's first name and the initial of their last name, along with the user's uncensored profile picture. After all, it's publicly available, isn't it?
Would people want their rants to appear on this site? "Probably not to be fair, but it was their choice, or lack of, with regards to their account privacy settings," reads the site's "About" page. "People have lost their jobs in the past due to some of the posts they put on Facebook, so maybe this demonstrates why. Efforts have been made to remove any personal data from the results, such as the actual phone numbers, surnames, etc. The data is still easily accessible from the API, the filters have been put in place to protect the site from legal issues."
According to Haywood, Facebook users need to become aware of what their privacy settings are and why they are important, and they need to learn not to "publish status updates containing potentially risky material as 'Public'"
"The problem is not with Facebook themselves, when used correctly, their privacy controls are very good," Haywood explained on the site's "About" page. "The problem is... people simply don't understand the risks of sharing everything."
Not only are people oblivious about the risks of over-sharing their lives on social media, but many don't even realize they are making those comments public in the first place. A surprisingly large number of people believe that since they have to log into a Web site in order to enter, all their activity on the site remains confined there. As WKWYD blatantly points out, this is an obvious misconception.
People can avoid being featured on WKWYD by adjusting their Facebook privacy setting. To do so, go to Settings in the top right corner of your Facebook page (near the Home button), select Privacy Settings, and make sure Control Your Default Privacy is not set to "Public." Setting the default to "Friends" would be a step forward, but Haywood further advises users to opt for the "Custom" privacy settings, "and go through each option to choose who can see what."
While many of those featured on WKWYD may feel offended, the response to the "experiment" has been "overwhelmingly positive so far," Haywood said on Twitter. The 18-year-old developer indicated the site received more than 100,000 unique visitors in the first 27 hours since its launch.
