June 30 - Why You Shouldn't Post Facebook Statuses About Being Hungover Or Hating Your Boss

[MorrisBX]

The posts on the new website We Know What You're Doing read like a list of exactly the things most people would never want strangers to know they're doing: bashing their bosses, showing up hungover to work, taking drugs, changing their cell phone numbers.

The site showcases the sometimes embarrassing Facebook posts of users who haven't checked their privacy settings recently -- or who choose not to keep their settings very private -- all thanks to a teenager from the U.K.

CNN reports 18-year-old web developer Callum Haywood launched We Know What You're Doing on Monday as an exercise in collecting data about how much people are willing to share online. The site gathers public posts from Facebook that use phrases like "hate my boss" or "hungover" and then displays them for anyone to see.

"I created the website to make people aware of the issues that it creates when they post such information on Facebook without any privacy settings enabled," Haywood told CNN. "The people featured on the site are most likely not aware that what they post as 'public' can be seen by absolutely anybody, and that Facebook will happily give away this information to other websites via its Graph API."

The Atlantic Wire was quick to point out the site's "creepy" factor, along with its swift rise to popularity: Haywood tweeted that within 27 hours of launching, We Know What You're Doing had seen 100,000 unique visitors.

Examples of posts from Facebook that made it onto We Know What You're Doing: "Im getting so mad right now I hate my boss Jay I hope he dies better yet I feel like killin him" and "nearly drowned in lager yesterday." Not things most users would want their boss to see.

People have been fired over Facebook posts in the past -- and Business Insider has a list of 17 famous cases. We Know What You're Doing does not, however, necessarily put people at greater risk. The site does not make Facebook users' private posts public, as Business Insider erroneously reported.

The site comprises only posts that are already public on Facebook, something Haywood clarified in a tweet about the Business Insider article: "...misleading title; the posts are already public, so its not my fault if people get fired, its theirs."

Source: Huffington Post