Most of us naively operate under the assumption that certain things we do (i.e. Facebook messages) are totally private and nobody can access this information.  Safe assumption, right?  Well unfortunately, Symantec just announced that that third-party Facebook applications had access to users’ accounts and profiles “for years meaning they could see your profile, photographs, chat messages and collect your personal information. Im sure many of you are saying oh I am not worried I have everything on Facebook set to private. Sorryeven the most savvy Facebook users were exposed as well.

The good news is that these applications may not have known that they could access this data. And, Facebook has confirmed that it plugged the leak. Howev

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Facebook takes on the issue is the data that was scraped wasn’t private at all. To a degree, I agree. The data is being shared through the site, it’s already public.

Here’s how it went down: a good guy hacker developed a program that went through all 500 million profiles and was able to skim (scrape) all the data from Facebook that wasn’t locked down via the users Facebook privacy settings. Basically if you didn’t lock your privacy settings down, it’s now available in this file. If you lock down your settings today, it’s still in this file.

What’s the point? Hackers like to tinker, and some like to make a point. It seems the hacker here wanted to make a point that your data on social media is up for grabs whether you like it or not.

What’s the risk? It seems the format and way the data was compiled is now searchable in a way that can benefit advertisers and marketers. Can it be used by

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