Facebook following deployment of the privacy of improving controls last week, Byron Ng, a computer technician from Vancouver, British Columbia, has begun to test whether the controls worked.It turns out they did not. Ng was able to go private photos of Paris Hilton at the Emmy Awards and his brother Nicolas Barron, as well as other pictures restricted access, according to The Associated Press.
The AP said it checked Ng acceding to the request by a photo that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had posted in 2005.
A spokesman for Facebook said in an e-mail that the hole in the privacy was a bug, and it was corrected immediately. "We take privacy very seriously and continue to make improvements to the site," said the spokesman.
Facebook and other social networking sites have continued to thrive despite warnings about the risks of revealing too much information online.
In a note on the blog this weekend, Petko Petkov D., founder of the consulting firm GnuCitizen security, social networks called a "very bad idea for security." He warned that the proliferation of personal information in the profiles of social networks allows the identity of malicious attacks, which he called "evil twin attacks."
Last week, the Children's Charities' Coalition for Internet Safety, a group based in the United Kingdom, has published an open letter calling on the British government officials make it illegal for businesses and educational institutions to scan social networking profiles for information which could be used to influence the hiring or admission decisions.
The group acknowledged that the use of the Internet to gather information accessible to the public, can be beneficial for businesses and educational institutions, but she feared that the continuation of such avenues of research as a matter of course could disadvantage those who do not participate online. He also expressed concern that unverified information, information taken out of context, or information intended to be private might exert undue influence on the procedures for the admission or hiring.
Sites social networks have also resisted repeated criticism of not doing enough to keep sexual predators away from their sites. In October, Facebook, as a result of an investigation initiated by the Attorney General of New York Andrew Cuomo, said that it would implement new measures to protect against sexual predators, the obscene content, and harassment.
