Drunks ,druggies and slackers exposed by Facebook posts

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Anastasia R hates her boss and hopes he dies. Lukey D is hungover. And Ellis M would like to share his new phone number.

The problem is that through ignorance or simply not caring, all three have made this information publicly available. They are just three people among those “exposed” by a new web project that is in turn exposing Facebook’s shortcomings.


“We know what you’re doing” is an experiment by British teenager Callum Hayward who is currently studying the rather appropriate combination of information communications technology, law and business.

He’s put together a site that trawls Facebook to find status updates that fit one of four categories: mentioning the words “hate my boss”; mentioning being hungover; mentioning illegal drugs; and listing a “new phone number”. The site then lists these details along with the profile photograph where available.

Although Hayward points out that all of this information is made in status updates that are set to be publicly available and thus he isn’t revealing any secrets, he does have some concessions to privacy. There are no links to profiles and surnames and abbreviated to an initial. Since launching the project he’s also deciding to start blanking out some of the digits in the listed phone numbers.

The site also has tools to see who has checked in on Foursquare in a particular location, and where your Facebook friends have checked in recently. (The latter requires you to authorize an application, though it has no posting rights and is only effective for a limited time.) Both of these tools were struggling to cope with demand at the time of writing.

Writing on the site’s FAQ, Hayward addresses the fact that those featured on his site wouldn’t want their posts included on it: “…it was their choice, or lack of, with regards to their account privacy settings.” He insists that “the problems is not with Facebook themselves; when used correctly, their privacy controls are very good. The problem is how people simply don’t understand the risks of sharing everything.”

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