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I've seen a million articles that say basically, "Be very careful what you put on Facebook because employers check that before they hire you... would you want them seeing pictures of your drunken party?"

These advice articles never address the obvious question of... how can random employers see my profile? Can't all this "advice" be addressed by simply checking your privacy settings?

Sklivvz
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BlueWhale
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2 Answers2

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This advice is based on default privacy settings as of 2010, for which pretty much everything except personal contact info was totally public. And with Facebook's SEO efforts, for many people would be top hit on Google when searching for their full name.

FB default privacy as of 2010

See Evolution of Facebook Privacy Policies

Since then, after lot of criticism privacy setting have been improved and advanced privacy settings introduced. So now you can keep everything private, with privacy groups you can separate your work friends, family, close buddies etc.

vartec
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    What's wrong with a bar chart or table? The data is not fit for this representation. –  Jun 29 '11 at 08:34
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    sadly this keeps on being shown to not be true in practice, as flaws keep being found. If you have a reasonably large group of friends, there are reasonable odds that your data is accessible to an employer. The guidance remains good. – Rory Alsop Jun 29 '11 at 11:38
  • @Rory: as I've said, now with groups, you may make content available to selected group of people, rather then generic "all friends". So even if you have a lot of people as "friends" on FB, it's still possible to keep privacy tight. Flaws... well, that's whole different subject... – vartec Jun 29 '11 at 12:01
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    no, you can't keep your privacy tight on Facebook. Even with the improvements they have made. See my answer for one route in which doesn't require flaws. – Rory Alsop Jun 29 '11 at 12:03
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Facebook divulges a lot of information through its API, and tools such as Maltego can provide you with vast quantities of relationships between individuals, information from their facebook accounts, linked to other social media accounts etc.

Have a look at this presentation for some deeper information.

Of course the 'can' they doesn't always line up with 'are they legally allowed' to - in may jurisdictions it is likely to be an offence... however that isn't really answering the question.

Rory Alsop
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  • Doesn't the API rrespect your privacy settings? – BlueWhale Jun 29 '11 at 12:04
  • All Maltego does, is data-mining **in publicly available data**, so how is that suppose let anyone extract **private** information? – vartec Jun 29 '11 at 14:03
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    By finding relationships. You may think your data is private, but you have no control over what settings your friends have, or how facebook and applications share data. I repeat, what you think you have set through the privacy settings in Facebook is definitely not what I would class as private! – Rory Alsop Jun 29 '11 at 14:06
  • Friends have no control over settings on my information. Even it they have **their** information public, that doesn't make my information public. You cannot let's say see my photos on Facebook, just because you'd find out who some of my friends are. – vartec Jun 29 '11 at 14:25
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    @BlueWhale, you may grant various trusts to an application, which gives it access to more of your data. FB App writers are required to promise not to infringe on several privacy rules (such as recording your name outside of FB), but this is unenforceable. – Oddthinking Jun 29 '11 at 16:16
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    @vartec, If I persuade your friends to install my app and grant permissions, and they can see your photos, then I can see your photos. Also, if you are applying to work at a subsidiary of Zenga, and you play Farmville, then they can access various data. – Oddthinking Jun 29 '11 at 16:18
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    @Odd: I've just checked one of Zynga's games on my profile, it has access to following information: name, profile picture, gender, networks, user ID, list of friends, birthday. It doesn't even have access to my own photos, let alone photos of my friends. I've checked few more app and it's pretty much the same. – vartec Jun 29 '11 at 16:36
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    @Vartec, I think you've made a good point there; less than I thought. Although some people might rather keep their friend's list out of their employers hands... – Oddthinking Jun 29 '11 at 16:53