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Facebook, why aren’t you protecting your greatest asset?

Did you know that Facebook, by default, allows 3rd party applications to access your photos? What’s the harm in that you ask? Well, it turns out that some nefarious application developers are using people’s likenesses in some alarming ways.

Blogger, Cheryl Smith reported this originally on her blog. [At the time I wrote this, her blog is down, no doubt to Digg-effect like traffic…think of all the Adsense revenue she’s missing out on!]. Her husband was browsing Facebook, when he was displayed a “hook up” advertisement letting him know that “Hot singles” were waiting for him…pretty common ad on Facebook, except the face in the ad, was his wife’s. DOH!

Yeah. Fortunately for him, Cheryl wasn’t up to any shenanigans. She was the victim of Facebook’s inadequate protection of user data. A 3rd party ad network, had retrieved her photo and displayed it in ads that we’re presented to her friends. Let me be clear, this is against Facebook’s terms of service (TOS), and the ad network was disabled by Facebook. However, it raises the question about what obligation Facebook has to protect your privacy and in this case your reputation?

Having your likeness displayed in a comprising and possibly damaging context, by an irresponsible 3rd party, could have far reaching impacts to you. Imagine if you’re using Facebook for professional networking and your colleagues saw that ad. What impact would that potentially have to your career? As far as her marital relationship, what if this unnecessarily caused friction between her and her husband? Lets that take argument to the extreme and ask, what if Cheryl’s husband was the jealous type, who had a violent temper and Cheryl had been harmed physically as a result of him seeing the ad? Luckily they realized how and why this happened, took it in stride and found humor in it. However, I wouldn’t expect the average Facebook user to be able to “put the pieces together” and walk away with a chuckle. This is a potentially dangerous situation.

This is against their TOS, and the ad network was punished, isn’t that enough? HELL NO! The fact that Facebook’s developer platform allows programmers to explicitly violate the TOS, without any safeguards, is alarming.

Why hasn’t Facebook taken the job of protecting it’s users reputations seriously?

At the end of the day, we’re their greatest asset. Without us, their $10 billion valuation goes right into the toilet.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Jul. 21, 2009