Then, later, I was brought up short when I saw a post by Jodi Wilkinson about what sites see when you use your Facebook login...
- Name
- Hometown
- Location
- Email address
- Gender
- Work: employer name, location, position title, start date
- Education: school, location, year, course specialisation
- Timezone and more...
Jodi writes that this is the minimum information that Facebook provides; and most sites request more. She gives an example of how one request for her data released "2,054 lines of data containing gps coordinates of all my check-ins, photos I’ve been tagged in, and everything someone has said on my wall in the last 6 months as well as the full name and facebook ids of my friends who posted on my wall."
So, even if I never use my Facebook details to login on other sites, if I've posted on a friend's wall and they login with Facebook then some of my info will leak to those sites!
Of course, the security guy is right: if Jodi hadn't put that info in Facebook in the first place then it wouldn't be available to be released. But how many of us have been far-sighted enough to think that way?
There's a growing American outcry against the poorly-drafted CISPA legislation there; and stirrings in the UK against planned government moves to mandate more Internet monitoring. Seeing the range of information that just one site, Facebook, has on individuals makes me a bit queasy and to agree with Tim Berners-Lee, 'father' of the world wide web, that this sort of legislation turns its subjects into a nation of suspects with nowhere to keep their thoughts private once they enter the electronic realm.
