Your
Facebook friends list, as Mashable revealed last week, is not as
private as it claims to be. Setting your list privacy to "Only Me"
doesn't actually mean that nobody can see who you're connected to,
because there's a loophole anyone can exploit.
The
loophole comes in the shape of Facebook's mutual friends feature. Any
user can see the mutual friends between any two other users, so long as
one of them has a publicly available friends list. So if you keep your
friends list private, but your best friend doesn't, a third party could
compare your two lists, and voilà — they'd be able to see all the
friends the two of you have in common.
This
feature has been in place at Facebook for some time. The company
doesn't see it as a problem, and warns users that the privacy of their
Friends List is actually dependent on the privacy settings of their
connections. But to show how much of a problem it can be, an online
security group called CyberInt built a program last week intended to
exploit the feature and reconstruct users' private friends lists.
The
mutual friends tool is a byproduct of the company's mission to connect
the whole world on the platform; the company believes it helps to see
which friends you share with other users. But it doesn't afford users as
much privacy as they might think they have. To prove that, we put the
mutual friends feature to the test with the most famous Facebook user of
all: founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg
keeps his friends list private, but he is also friends with longtime
Facebook employee and head of product Chris Cox, whose friends list is
public. Cox and Zuckerberg have 248 shared connections, and thanks to
that fact (and further friends list comparisons) we were able to see
more than 400 of Zuckerberg's Facebook friends.
Not
surprisingly, Zuckerberg is friends with many of Silicon Valleys most
prominent tech icons, including dozens of CEOs and VCs and fellow
billionaires. It definitely doesn't come as a shock to see Facebook
board members like Marc Andreessen and Don Graham, and early employees
such as Napster co-founder and former Facebook president Sean Parker, on
the list.
But
there were also surprises. Included amongst Zuckerberg's list of
friends: Robin Li, cofounder of Chinese search engine Baidu, and China's
third richest man ($11.1 billion net worth, according to Forbes). Here
are some more intriguing names we uncovered:
Alison Pincus, Cofounder of home decor marketplace One King's Lane (and wife of Zynga cofounder Mark Pincus)
Barry Diller, Chairman of IAC/InterActiveCorp, media executive
Ben Horowitz, Cofounder of VC firm Andreessen Horowitz
Biz Stone, Cofounder of Twitter, CEO and founder of Jelly
Blake Ross, Co-creator of Mozilla Firefox
Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb
Charlie Cheever, Cofounder of Quora
Dave Goldberg, CEO of SurveyMokey (and Sandberg's husband)
Dennis Crowley, CEO of Foursquare
Drew Houston, CEO of Dropbox
Ev Williams, CEO of Medium, Twitter cofounder
Jack Dorsey, CEO and founder of Square, Twitter cofounder
Jack Xu, Co-president and CTO at SINA (owns Sina Weibo, China's version of Twitter)
Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of Yelp
John Donahoe, President and CEO of eBay
Keith Rabois, Venture Capitalist at Shasta Ventures
Marc Andreessen, Cofounder of VC firm Andreessen Horowitz and Facebook board member
Qi Lu, Executive VP at Microsoft
Robin Li, CEO and cofounder at Chinese search company Baidu (China's third richest man)
Scott Sassa, Former CEO of Friendster
Sean Parker, Cofounder of Napster, early President at Facebook
Trip Adler, CEO and cofounder of Scribd
You
can't see a connection if both users hide their friends list, as is the
case with Zuckerberg and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. We assume the
two are friends, but you can't tell by using the mutual friends search.
Zuckerberg's full friends list likely features even more intriguing tech
connections.
Still,
the list is a relatively in-depth look at the personal and professional
connections of one of Silicon Valley's most powerful CEOs — and if
Facebook doesn't believe the friends list loophole is a problem, then
Facebook has to be okay with everyone in the world knowing who
Zuckerberg is connected to.
A
Facebook spokesperson declined to comment on Zuckerberg's friends list,
but did share a statement about the mutual friends tool in general.
Facebook
has not shared any plans to change this mutual friends tool. Unless it
does, users should understand that their friends list is just as visible
as Zuckerberg's with a bit of digging — even if they set it to be seen
by "only me."
Posted by : Gizmeon
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