With every click on Facebook, you leave a little trail of your social life. Now researchers are saying they can piece those clues together, and pick out who your closest friends are.

Man filmed his partner's labor, then sued TV companies that picked up the video.

A court ruling could make it difficult to trust U.S. tech companies with private information.

TL;DR: Facebook collects data about you in hundreds of ways, across numerous channels. It’s very hard to opt out, but by reading about what they collect, you can understand the risks of the platform and choose to be more restrictive with your Facebook usage.

This study compares the accuracy of human and computer-based personality judgments, using a sample of 86,220 volunteers who completed a 100-item personality questionnaire. We show that (i) computer predictions based on a generic digital footprint (Facebook Likes) are more accurate (r = 0.56) than those made by the participants’ Facebook friends using a personality questionnaire (r = 0.49

Facebook, Google+ and Twitter supply official sharing code snippets which quietly siphon personal data from all page visitors. Shariff enables visitors to see how popular your page is on Facebook and share your content with others without needless data leaks.

Shariff (/ˈʃɛɹɪf/) is an open-source, low-maintenance, high-privacy solution maintained by German computer magazine c't and heise online.

The simple way to completely avoid this is to refuse to have a Facebook page. However, a compromise may be possible, one which attracts public support while not boosting Facebook's power much. This article proposes such a compromise.

Facebook is a surveillance engine, accumulating lots of personal data which is also available to the state. For your privacy and freedom's sake, it is important not to have an active Facebook account; refusing blocks Facebook's main channel for collecting information about you and, through you, about your friends and relatives. (Whatsapp, a subsidiary of Facebook, is also important to avoid.) Explaining to them why you firmly insist on routing your communications with them through some other system will strengthen your will power to resist systems that use you to harm you and others.

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The simple way to completely avoid this is to refuse to have a Facebook page. However, a compromise may be possible, one which attracts public support while not boosting Facebook's power much. This article proposes such a compromise.

For several years, a data firm eventually hired by the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, has been using Facebook as a tool to build psychological profiles that represent some 230 million adult Americans. A spinoff of a British consulting company and sometime-defense contractor known for its counterterrorism “psy ops” work in Afghanistan, the firm does so by seeding the social network with personality quizzes. Respondents — by now hundreds of thousands of us, mostly female and mostly young but enough male and older for the firm to make inferences about others with similar behaviors and demographics — get a free look at their Ocean scores. Cambridge Analytica also gets a look at their scores and, thanks to Facebook, gains access to their profiles and real names.

I was surprised to see the Facebook SDK being loaded in the network tab on my blog when I don't have any Facebook buttons. It turned out to be coming courtesy of Disqus. No wonder Facebook knows everywhere you go!

Facebook claims that no one can intercept WhatsApp messages, not even the company and its staff, ensuring privacy for its billion-plus users. But new research shows that the company could in fact read messages due to the way WhatsApp has implemented its end-to-end encryption protocol.

Since 2012, Facebook has been working with data brokers to acquire even more information on its users. According to a report from ProPublica, this information can include a user’s income, restaurant habits, and credit card activities.

Combine third party data with what Facebook already knows about its users from using the social network and it is hard to think of any piece of information the company doesn’t have about a person.

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People regularly ask how Facebook, with its massive data management costs, can offer its service for free. The answer is simple, the product is you.

show-facebook-computer-vision-tags - A very simple Chrome Extension that displays the automated image tags that Facebook has generated for your images

The site shows users how Facebook categorizes them. It doesn’t reveal the data it is buying about their offline lives.

Find out what data Facebook stores about you. Join us in our fight for a social network that respects our right to privacy.

Social media giant Facebook has confessed to giving the personal details of thousands of its users to the British government this year.

Changes in default profile settings over time