You hate your job, you loathe your boss and your team are a bunch of jerks, but you still shouldn’t put it on Facebook. Why? Because it might end up on this guy’s new website showing the world just how stupid you are.
Callum Haywood is an 18-year old developer who thought it would be fun to show people just how stupid they were being with their social networks in our highly connected society. He was inspired by a video that shows people how much of their information is published and accessible without them even knowing, and decided to create something of his own.
It’s called We Know What You’re Doing…, and it’s a wall full of people complaining about their bosses, professing their love for drugs, admitting hangovers and posting phone numbers. It’s all public and it’s there to teach you a lesson, Haywood writes:
These people probably wouldn’t want this info publishing, would they? Probably not to be fair, but it was their choice, or lack of, with regards to their account privacy settings. People have lost their jobs in the past due to some of the posts they put on Facebook, so maybe this demonstrates why.
Just make sure your Facebook privacy settings are sufficient, for example don’t publish status updates containing potentially risky material as ‘Public’ because then they have a good chance of showing up in the public Graph API. You don’t even need an access token to get this info, but the problem is not with Facebook themselves, when used correctly, their privacy controls are very good. The problem is how people simply don’t understand the risks of sharing everything.
The site scrapes public posts from Facebook’s Graph API and Facebook Places and filters out the crap to make it more readable. It’s been live for 12 hours, and Haywood says that he’s had over 10,000 visits already.
I’m sure he’d be happy to have none if it meant that people had learnt their lesson.