They know your secrets!

You have a Facebook account? You set up all the right privacy settings? Now your data is safe!!! Haha, think again.

It is easy to know your full name, friends, gender, age, interests, location, job and education. Facebook even has a free feature to find out just that, thanks to its recent privacy changes. The way of using this was first publicized by blogger Max Klein. He used a Facebook feature that lets people find their friends on Facebook by uploading all the e-mail addresses in their contact list.

This is no problem you say, its just for personal use anyway. But as Klein points out, a marketer could take a list of 1,000 e-mail addresses, wherever he got those from, and upload them via a fake Facebook account. Then he can see all the profiles created using those addresses. Now take Facebook’s reach and remember that most people use only a single e-email address, the results could be amazing.

So depending on how the users set their privacy options the marketer could update his email list with names, ages, locations, interests, photos, wall posts and names of all the friends.

But this information isn’t available for all users you say? Facebook changed its privacy settings last December, remember? Since then certain information about you can’t be made private anymore, such as your name, the current city, profile photo, gender, friend list (you can hide this one a bit though).

Facebook admits that anyone with your e-mail address can get all those details about you. They also set limits on how many e-mail addresses you can check at once, but this wont be a big problem with the right software. With the new privacy settings you can setup many things, like being found by your name. But if someone knows your e-mail address, they can find the rest of your profile information that Facebook now calls “public”. This is obviously very valuable information to marketers who can and will use it.

Ever wondered how all those little Facebook applications knew your name and other details? This is a similar story, only now outsiders can get all your information, even without any Facebook approved application. And the worst thing is, it can’t even be detected if someone is using this loophole or not.

Still feeling safe on Facebook? Leave your comment below…