Aran Khanna - Facebook's Privacy Incident Response [Pdf - Eng]

Aran Khanna - Facebook's Privacy Incident Response [Pdf - Eng]

.:Details:.
Language: English
Year: 2015
Page: 17
Khanna A. Facebook's Privacy Incident Response: a study of geolocation sharing on Facebook
Messenger. Technology Science. 2015081101. August 11, 2015.


.:Abstract:.

Facebook allows users to chat among themselves on a mobile app called Facebook
Messenger. From 2011 to the start of this study in May 2015, Facebook Messenger collected
and shared user geo-locations as the default setting for every message sent from the Android
mobile app. These locations were visible to anyone in a group chat, regardless of his or her
relationship to the sender on the Facebook social network. Noticing a lack of significant
public response to the visible nature of geo-location data on Facebook Messenger, despite
media coverage dating back to 2012, I hypothesized that users were either not aware, or
not concerned about the collection and visibility of their geo-location data on the app.
This study explored this hypothesis by testing how the public responded to easily seeing the
historical geo-location data collected and shared by Facebook Messenger. This study also
tested the response from Facebook, a company with a reputation for encouraging outside-
the-box “hacking”. I wrote a browser application that requires a Facebook user to log into
their Facebook account and then displays on a map the geo-location data shared with that
user through Facebook Messenger chats. I announced the tool in a blog post and publicized it
on Twitter and a few other online forums. The immediate public response was that of
surprise and concern over the privacy issue raised by the collection and visibility of the geo-
location data.

.:COVERS:.