Information Madness

Facebook is known for playing around with people's privacy for a long time. First defaulting everyone's feeds visible to everyone, defaulting your profile searchable and now introducing the so called "Open Graph" that claims to make your browsing experience better with integrating other web applications accessing your facebook account information.

Today, a software engineer for the charitable arm of Google Ka-Ping Yee found a serious privacy hole in Facebook's Open Graph API that will make all your event attendance public.

 

This Open Graph API will let you see the public events that people have said they will attend, or have attended. Facebook is exposing the list of events that you have attended or will attend in future.

So here is how you can completely disable Open Graph from your Facebook account and keep your privacy intact. (thanks Ross)

1. First up, sign in to Facebook. From your Account drop-down list, select Privacy Settings.

2. Click the Applications and Websites link.
3. Click the Edit Setting button in the Instant Personalization section.
4. Remove the check from the box labeled Allow select partners to instantly personalize their features with my public information with I first arrive on their websites

5. When prompted, click the Confirm button.
6. Back at the Applications and Websites section of the Privacy Settings, click the Edit Settings button next to What your friends can share about you
7. Remove the check mark from every single item listed and then click the Save Changes button.
8. You’re almost done. Now you have to disable the 3 initial partners that Facebook is working with. Start out by heading to the Facebook Docs page. On the left side of that page, locate the Block Application link, and click it.
9. Click Block Docs when prompted.
10. Now you’ll need to block two other Facebook apps as well – the Pandora app and the Yelp app.