I recently read an article that had to do with a data breach that took place on Facebook.  Basically, the article discusses how a “security enthusiast” named Suriya Prakash was browsing through Facebook on his phone when he discovered an option called ‘Find Friends’  (This option was also recently available on instagram, but no longer is, which goes along with the rest of this blog post). This option enabled him (and anybody else who know about it) to “search a random phone number to view someone’s full profile”, which is really quite scary to think about.  Facebook eventually caught on to what was happening, and blocked the script he was using that allowed him to view hundreds of accounts just by entering a persons’ phone number.  This option is no longer even available, to the best of my knowledge, and it is because Facebook is making attempts to improve security and privacy measures on the social networking site.  It is, however, very scary that this was even an option in the first place.  Mobile Facebook was basically making anybody’s account available to the world, which should never have even been an option in the first place, but luckily this was taken care of rather quickly.  Although it was taken down quickly, it was still an option for long enough that thousands of accounts could have been accessed.  This article talks about how just one person was able to access hundreds of accounts, so imagine how many other people would have been able to do the same thing while this ‘Find Friends’ option was available on Mobile Facebook.

Another thing I came across while reading this article is something that we have discussed a few times in class.  “Facebook’s privacy settings are confusing so most people haven’t adequately protected themselves”.  This is very true, as we all have agreed for the most part, and it is something that Facebook needs to work on to make their company and site more user friendly, and catered to what people want, which is privacy from the rest of the world.  Facebook probably makes it difficult to follow their privacy settings at first and has the defaults as public as possible because they want as much information to be shared as possible, but I think it is up to the users how their information is made available and who it is available to.

Here’s the link to this brief article.  <http://hothardware.com/News/Facebook-Confirms-Massive-Data-Breach-and-Vulnerability/>