Image via Wikipedia

The chances are that I’m not your friend on Facebook. But that doesn’t matter. I can almost certainly access personal content that you’ve posted on the network.

With a very simple web script I could mine the comments that you are making to your Friends on your Facebook page – unless you’ve throttled back your security settings to the maximum level of protection.

Speed’s Dan Howe tracks social media developer sites and forums and has spotted a potential security hole in the Facebook applications designers Graph API. An API is a fancy name for how one software application such as Facebook talks to another. TechCrunch also spotted the conversations about the hole and covered the story this afternoon.

The Facebook Graph API can be used to find out what people are posting behind the network’s closed walls.

Here’s an application call for everyone that is making posts about a job interview. If you click on the link you’ll see the code generated by the API-call. Look closer and you’ll see text strings of each conversation that mention the string “job interview”.

Can you see the privacy issues we can?

Of course we could make the presentation prettier by designing an application to manipulate the search data and present it in a more attractive way, but that’s the not the point. This is a very trivial example that demonstrates how easy it is for developer to integrate user data within what we assume to be a closed social network.

I caught up with Dan this afternoon. He’s been working with the API and reckons that unless you have locked down your privacy settings to a friends only setting it is possible for anyone with a web browser to access content that you post on your personal Facebook page.

Facebook has published a list of the type of search queries supported in the documentation for the Graph API. These include individual users (you and me), pages, events, groups and status messages. It’s a marketing wet dream.

I don’t know about you but it makes me very uncomfortable and I’ve locked down my security settings as a result. Privacy and transparency are the two issues that could halt the phenomenal growth of social media.

Facebook must make users aware of the potential of the tools that it’s making available to harness data and content posted within its network if it’s to avoid a backlash.