If You Tell Someone a Secret, You No Longer Control It

Back in March I wrote about how to protect your privacy when using Facebook. One of the pieces of advice I gave was not to install any of the multitude of applications available – unless you have a really good reason for doing so. The reason being that when you do, you give the company who owns that application access to all your personal information held by Facebook, like your contact details, your date of birth, and your photos.

Once you load your personal information onto your Facebook profile, you’ve lost control of it; Facebook also has control over it.

Sure, you have a commitment from Facebook that they will not give it to anyone unless you agree to it.

But then you go and sign up for a Facebook application, and Facebook also loses control of your personal information. The company who wrote the application now also has control over it.

And yes – Facebook does take steps to protect you – they get the companies who write applications to agree to certain restricted conditions when using your photo. But, if a company decides to ignore that agreement, they can – for a short time anyway, before Facebook kicks them out. But by then the damage is done.

This is exactly what happened with a dating website – they created a Facebook application, and then took photos that people had uploaded and used them to advertise their dating service.

The bottom line is – if you want to keep something private, keep it to yourself! If I were the mafia, I’d be writing a clever application that millions of Facebook users would want to sign up for – and instantly get access to a honeypot of juicy personal details to wreak identity theft havoc with <insert evil laugh here>.