What is Openbook? Openbook draws attention to the information Facebook makes public about its users via its search API. Facebook exposed this service on April 21st, 2010. Our goal is to get Facebook to restore the privacy of this information, so that this website and others like it no longer work. If you have questions, or are a media person, you can email Will and Peter at: facepalm.inquiries@gmail.com This website is a parody, and has no relationship to Facebook. What has Facebook done wrong? Facebook has made two clear mistakes here. First, they do not do a good job of indicating how public each piece of information you share on the site will be. Second, they change the rules far too often. If you understood Facebook's privacy settings two years ago (or even six months ago) that information would be worse than useless with today's bewildering settings. Do I need to be logged into Facebook? No! Anybody can search, even if they don't have a Facebook account. However, if you are logged into your Facebook account, you'll see full profile pages when you click on a user. What should I do with my Facebook account? ReclaimPrivacy.org has an excellent tool that will show you what is public about your profile, and makes it very simple and easy to secure your privacy settings. Many people feel that Facebook has violated their trust, and are pledging to delete their accounts on May 31st. Are people really deleting their Facebook accounts? It looks that way. Currently delete facebook account is one of the top searches on Google. Who has written about Openbook? ReadWriteWeb Metafilter Search Engine Land The Register Gawker FlowingData PC Pro Sun Sentinel NBC Bay Area PC World The Consumerist Education for the Driving Masses TechCrunch The Command Line Are you guys HACKING FACEBOOK!?!?!?! No. We are using Facebook's documented APIs. It's a completely public API that any programmer can use. What's with the quote in the corner, “They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks.”? It's a link. Click it. Who are we? We are three Facebook users concerned about privacy. We work as software engineers and designers in San Francisco. Who built Openbook? How? When? Concept and Code by Will Moffat and Peter Burns. Design by James Home. Icons by Fat Cow and Ajaxload. Hosted on the awesome GitHub pages. Openbook is a pure client-side HTML, JS and CSS app that makes simple requests to the Facebook API. We started working on it late Wednesday night (May 12th 2010) and had the site working within an hour or two. Since then the only substantive changes we've made have been to the design and presentation. How much traffic are you getting? We wrote the site Wednesday night. Date Hits Visitors Thursday 10,865 3,262 Friday 131,895 38,121 Saturday 226,916 58,959 Sunday 319,586 77,148 Monday 808,751 177,025 Total 1,498,013 335,915 Link Some good examples of i've found on OpenBook that you probably wouldn't want to share with just anyone... well if it was me I wouldn't anyway. Do you care that the whole world knows that now? A good way not to get a reference? lets hope your next employer doesn't Facebook you before offering the job. Is your Facebook information public? or do you even care either way?
Mine is definitely not public, though there isn't even anything that I want to keep hidden, I just prefer it that way.
There's nothing hidden in mine, no real personal info other than my name, date of birth, and a slightly unclear profile picture. So I don't even care or look at what info is public. The control panel pages from Facebook are a mess anyway. Btw, one thing I do hate however, is the high amount of random websites that randomly ask to access your Facebook 'personal' info. I don't like that kind of integration, I'd like Facebook to stay on it's servers where it belongs, not to invade the web..