Facebook can't do privacy, it's impossible

PRIVACY ON SOCIAL NETWORKS is impossible, according to a research report.

It all boils down to the use of recommendation engines, which mines the links that come up on social notworking websites to recommend stuff like contacts and products to buy.

This is great for advertising, but this type of thing obviously will end up compromising your privacy by revealing your poor taste in music or the fact you've been talking with your ex-wife.

Researchers at Stanford University said that breaches of privacy are inevitable, and actually worked out that there is a fundamental limit to the level of privacy possible when social networks are mined like this.

Simply put, information about recommendations can only be accurate if you breach the privacy of social notworking users. Which is common sense when you think about it.

Even if you try to preserve privacy by making data anonymous and adding 'noise', the same problems show up.

"This finding throws into serious question the feasibility of developing social recommendation algorithms that are both accurate and privacy-preserving for many real-world settings," said the study authors.

Facebook is a business, and these engines are one way in which it can make money. In the pursuit of profit it breaches privacy and keeps putting in changes that push further, but it remains to be seen whether most people will make such a trade off to be 'social'.

It's rare to see a security researcher or a privacy advocate on Facebook. There's a reason for that. And head honcho Mark Zuckerberg's view? Well we already know his views on the 'privacy' you might be expecting but won't be able to easily maintain any longer on Facebook. µ