Ok, this is a bit of a departure from my usual, work-related posting. That said, security fits into the rubric of "more serious postings", even if that security is related to social networks. Who knows: maybe I'll decide to move it, later. At any rate...
I'm a big fan of social networking. In addition to my various blogs (on Posterous, BlogSpot, Tumblr, etc.), I make heavy use of services like FaceBook, Plus and Twitter (and have "personal" and "work" personnae set up on each). On some services (FaceBook and LiveJournal) I run my accounts fairly locked-down; on others (most everything else), I run things wide-open. In either case, I'm not exactly the most censored of individuals. The way I look at it, if someone's going to use my postings against me, I may as well make it easy for them to do it up front than to put myself in a position where I'm invested in an individual or an organization only to have my posting history negatively subsequently sabotage that. It's a pick your poison kind of thing.
That said, not everyone is quite as laissez-faire about their online sharing activities. So, in general, I prefer to keep my stuff at least as locked down as the members of my sharing community do. That way, there's a lower likelihood that my activities will accidentally compromise someone else.
Today, a FaceBook friend of mine was trying to sort through they myriad security settings available to her so that she could create a "close friends only" kind of profile. She'd thought that she'd gotten things pretty locked down, until an unexpected personal message revealed to her that she had information leakage, somewhere, in her FaceBook usage. I was trying to help her ID it.
While my friend had fairly restrictively locked down her profile, she wasn't aware that certain actions could compromise those settings. Specifically, she wasn't aware that if she posted a comment to a public (or at least more open) thread, that others would be able to "see her". She'd assumed that if she set all of her security buttons-n-dials to "friends only" that anything she did would be kept friends only. With FaceBook, that's mostly the case. However, if you comment on a thread started by another friend, then everyone who is able to see that thread can "see" (aspects of) you, as well. Thus, if a friend starts a thread and has the permissions set to public and you comment on it, the entire Internet can see that you have some kind of FaceBook presence, even if they don't have permission to view your profile/timeline.
In attempting to illustrate this, I took a screen capture of a post that had been set to public. I'd done so using the post of someone I thought was a shared friend (when I'd clicked on the poster's profile, both myself and my security-conscious friend appeared to show up in the poster's "mutual friends" list). It turns out I was mistaken in that thought.
When I'd posted the screen shot to my security-conscious friend's wall, I tagged the original poster in that wall post. My security-conscious friend had set her wall to "friends only". When she informed me that the public-poster was not a mutual "friend" but a "friend of a friend", I'd made the suppostion that the tagging of the public-posting friend would be moot. After all: what kind of security model would allow me to overrided my security-conscious friend's wall security settings with something so simple as a tag-event? Turns out, FaceBook's security model would. To me, that would fall into the general heading of a "broken security model".
Oh well, now to figure out how to rattle some cages in FaceBook's site usability group to get them to fix that.
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