Leaking Information
4 Jul. 2008
One of the topics du jour in Internet research circles is privacy, and whether we're selling our personal information up the river. Facebook tends to be the main focus of such musings. At any rate, blah blah blah - I fired up one of my Facebook applications today (a little thing called "Friend Wheel" that generates a data visualization of the connections between your Facebook friends) and it spat a MySQL error back at me. A quite informative one, as a matter of fact - one that let me know exactly what it is that I am agreeing to when I say that I "agree to allow this application to access my profile information." It's interesting to actually see visual proof of what information you're divulging, and not just hear spinning theories.
Here's the error:
Mysql Error in /opt/lampp/htdocs/facebook/friendwheel/index.php, line 141.
Whole query: INSERT INTO userdetails (application, datetime, sex, birthday, country) VALUES ('friendwheel','2008-07-04 14:04:40','female','197x-0x-0x','United States')
Mysql said:Too many connections
Basically what this says is that this application - which only needs access to my name, friend list, and a list of which friends each of them is connected to - is also writing my sex, birth date, country, and time that I accessed the application to a database and is saving that for later use. Presumably some sort of metrics. But for what? Why do the application developers need this info?
Leaking information, indeed.