Facebook isn't private at all ... so why are you posting your shit online?

Most facebook users would have seen the useless post about asking your friends to "unsubscribe from my posts" or something along the lines of not wanting to spam your timeline/feed. Although it does work to some extent (it doesn't really hide anything - just stops publishing to a friend's wall ... they can still see it if they want to) it does nothing to protect your privacy online.

Facebook is unfortunately very 'open' and may actually violate some privacy T&Cs. After numerous attempts at setting/resetting options in the profile pages this is what I have found out.

All your actions remain public as long as you are friends with me
Yup ... whatever you like/unlike/share/post/tag/subscribe can be seen by everyone. If you chose to post all your actions online they remain as a live feed on a ticker which is updated in real-time. [PS: If you don't see a ticker, that means your account is either dormant, inactive, insufficient feeds etc ... see this for official statement from FB]

Most people never notice the ticker because by default, the ticker is hidden at the top right of your newsfeed page. Mouseover and you see the dropdown menu for "Show ticker" .... by watching the feed scroll through for a while, I've noticed my friends have pretty weird tastes and likings.

Published e-mail address
Facebook used to publish your e-mail address (the one you signed up with when you created your account) on your profile page - unless you chose to hide it. Using your email address, a simple search on Google would reveal some pretty interesting (and sometimes shocking) information about your friends.

Luckily, FB tried to block this privacy loophole by quitely replacing all your e-mail addresses with a computer generated one ending with @facebook.com. If you never noticed this, then go to your profile page and you'll see your new facebook email address which people can send email to (and it will appear as a message on your feed). You are free to change this back to your own address but why would you want to?

Usernames
So facebook evaded the privacy issue with emails ... it will never be able to solve the next problem - that humans are really lazy @$$holes.

Ask yourself this, how many accounts do you have (email, banking, forum, etc) that use the same USERNAME you have on facebook now? Take that username and feed it into your favourite search engine and you may be surprised what turns up. On my last check, I have friends subscribed to S&M forums, hentai sites, LGBT forums, religion based sites etc ..... the list goes on and on. Note that this flaw won't work if you let facebook auto generate a user name for you (which I recommend for all sites)

Some funny algorithm ... which I'm still figuring out
Go to a friends facebook page - look for his/her friend list - start clicking around the friends on their list. Then click on your friend's subscriptions/likes and do the same with the friends of your friends (i.e. check out their subscriptions/likes and so on). Sooner or later, on YOUR OWN facebook news feed you will see a suggested friends or suggested posts (especially if using the facebook app on ios or android) of whatever your friend (and friends of friend) subscribed to or liked eventhough they were hidden from their timeline.

Believe me ... it gets creepy what some people like.

There are probably other ways you can facebook stalk someone but these are the most obvious ones I've found so far ... and for those on MY facebook friends list, don't worry - your secret(s) are safe with me and will remain as such till the day I die.

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