Unsafe data can go viral on sites

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A new website called weknowwhatyouredoing.com (WKWYD) created by a British teenager highlights the dangers of revealing private information on social networking services. “We Know What You’re Doing” exposes the compromising status updates of Facebook and Foursquare users who haven’t set their accounts on private.

WKWYD’s search tool hunts Facebook and Foursquare for key words such as “hung-over” and “cannabis” and divides the findings into four categories: “Who wants to get fired?” “Who’s hung-over?” “Who’s taking drugs?” and “Who’s got a new phone number?”
Some recently posted messages on this site are, “I hate my boss. They always make decisions on your behalf and they constantly believe they made the right choice...as an employee you have to suffer and oblige those commitments...” “Hung-over and taking my nieces to the park — how nice I am!” “Yes, I smoke weed and no, I’m not a bad person.”
The site is the brainchild of 18-year-old web developer Callum Haywood. Since the website went live it has been seen over a million times and has close to 35,000 likes on Facebook said Haywood. “I created the website to make people aware of the issues that arise when they post such information on Facebook without any privacy settings enabled,” Haywood told this paper.
“The people featured on the site are most likely not aware of the fact that what they post as ‘public’ can be seen by absolutely anybody and that Facebook will happily give away this information to other websites via its Graph API,” he adds.
The message that Haywood would like to spread to the public therefore is, “if you use Facebook, you should understand the privacy settings and double check if you are happy with whom you are sharing your information. Ultimately, be in control of your personal information.”
Talking about his website, Haywood explains, “It is an experiment. From a legal perspective, let me say that I’m not claiming that the people do what they’re being categorised under on my site.”
“When people post such information, it is a reflection on them, it does not matter if, for example, you jokingly put “I hate my boss,” if your boss sees that, he or she is not going to see it in a joking context, and you could get into trouble or even lose your job. People may not mean what they say, but it is difficult to interpret whether they do or don’t,” says Haywood.
WKWYD is not the only site to highlight the risks of over-sharing online. Please Rob Me and Openbook are other such sites.
When asked if his site could be held responsible for any damages that it might cause to users, Haywood said, “Absolutely not, legally neither me or my website are responsible for any event that may occur from the content that is featured on it.”