Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Openbook website allows anyone to search embarrassing Facebook updates

A new website allows anyone to trawl through embarrassing and indiscreet status updates posted by Facebook users.

Openbook is the brainchild of three San Francisco web developers
Openbook is the brainchild of three San Francisco web developers 
The Openbook search engine scans all "public" updates left by members of the social networking site, meaning that messages intended for small circles of friends and family can be read by everyone on the internet.
The website has been established to highlight Facebook's complex privacy settings, which have been blamed for confusing users into disclosing more personal information than they intend.
Searching Openbook for potentially compromising terms like "sex", "boss" or "drunk" throws up thousands of updates from the past few hours.
While many Facebook members will have made a conscious decision to set their updates to public, Openbook's creators say that a large proportion may not be aware that their messages can be read by anyone online.
All of the content searched by Openbook is already in the public domain, but the privacy campaigners hope that presenting the information in a searchable format on a single site will make social network members think twice about how much they share.
There have been several instances in recent years of Facebook members being caught out by indelicate or impolitic status updates. In 2009 a 16-year-old office worker from Clacton in Essex was fired from her job as an office administrator after branding the work "boring" on her online profile.
And in March this year a travel agent from Coventry in the West Midlands was fired after writing that she wanted to ''smack the brown-nosing cow in the face'' in an insulting post about a colleague.
Last month Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook co-founder, announced that the site's privacy settings would be simplified after growing complaints that users were being duped into sharing private information.
He admitted that the site “missed the mark” on allowing its almost 500 million users to easily control how much of their data could be seen by the public.
Openbook is the brainchild of Will Moffat, Peter Burns and James Home, three website developers from San Francisco.

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