Another reason to be careful what you post on Facebook:All it takes is a simple Google search, and phishers and marketers can glean a treasure trove of private information based on relationships among Facebook "friends," according to new research.
Researchers from the U.K.'s University of Cambridge recently published a paper (PDF) detailing a project in which they developed a software tool to correlate and map Facebook profiles they found via public search engines, such as Google, to build detailed maps of relationships among Facebook members.
"Knowing who a person's friends are is valuable information to marketers, employers, credit rating agencies, insurers, spammers, phishers, police, and intelligence agencies, but protecting the social graph is more difficult than protecting personal data," the researchers wrote in their paper. "Personal data privacy can be managed individually by users, while information about a user's place in the social graph can be revealed by any of the user's friends."
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