http://defendourfreedoms.net/2011/01/17/facebook-gives-apps-access-to-addresses-and-phone-numbers.aspx
Facebook gives apps access to addresses and phone numbers

http://defendourfreedoms.net/2010/12/16/facial-recognition-comes-to-facebook-photo-tags.aspx
Facial recognition comes to Facebook photo tags

But there hasn't been much talk or coverage on where that data went since it happened.  Many people that have Facebook accounts have no idea about that data breach.  I just came across this morning some results of that data breach. I found a new site called Face To Facebook.  And they are showing what they have been doing to that data:






Here is an excerpt from the Face to Facebook site.  They are openly admitting they are stalking these people and collecting all the data.  How many of these people know they are on this wall, being mapped, tracked and traced?

Excerpt from Face to Facebook:

How we did it

Through special custom software we collected data from more than 1,000,000 Facebook users. What we collected is their "public data" - some of their personal data (name, country, Facebook groups they subscribe to) plus their main profile picture and a few friend relationships. We built a database with all this data, then began to analyze the pictures that showed smiling faces. The vast majority of pictures were both amateurish and somehow almost involuntarily or unconsciously alluring. And they are almost always "smiling".

It's also evident that the majority of users want to appear in the best shape and look. They are acting on Facebook’s mandatory mechanism: establish new relationships. Facebook is based on the voluntary uploading of personal data and sharing it with friends. The more friends the better. Being personal and popular a Facebook user is exposing him/herself to many others, continuing to establish new relationships.

Once the database was ready, we studied and customized a face recognition algorithm. The algorithm used self learning neural networks and was programmed to "group" the huge amount of faces we collected (and their attached data) in a few simple categories. The categories are among the most popular that we usually use to define a person at a distance, without knowing him/her, or judging based only on a few behaviors. We picked six categories ("climber", "easy going", "funny", "mild", "sly" and "smug" - working definitions), with some intuitive differences, for both male and female subjects.
The software effectively extracted 250,000 faces that were connected to the relevant public data in our database.

After grouping them, we started to dive into these seas of faces, with all the perceptual consequences. And we started to think about why we felt so overwhelmed.

(snip)

Excerpt from another page of Face to Facebook:


As such they offer what can be termed as “crowdsourced targeting” – the indirect identification of people’s targets and desires by the users themselves. In fact the spontaneously posted data provides an endless (almost automatic) mutual profiling, enriching and updating the single virtual identities, in a collective self-positioning. But can profile data be liberated from Facebook’s inexorable logic? The answer is yes, but it's important to focus on the core of the Facebook profiles and see how they are recognized as virtual identities.

First, the profiles sublimate the owners' (real) social actions and references through their virtual presences. Second, they synthesize their effectiveness in representing real people through a specific element: the profile picture. This picture, an important Facebook interface, more often than not shows a face, and a smiling one at that. Our face is our most private space and simultaneously the most exposed one. How many people are allowed to touch our face, for example?
And generally speaking, the face is also one of the major points of reference we have in the world.

There are even "special" regions of the human brain, such as the fusiform face area (FFA), which may have become specialized at facial recognition [3]. Faces are now so exposed that they do not remain private, but are thrust into the public domain and shared (they can even be "tagged" by other people). So any virtual identity (composed of a face picture and some related data) can be stolen and become part of another identity, through a simple re-contextualization of the same data.

Furthermore, "face recognition" techniques can be applied to group vast amount of Facebook pictures. This process is also quite paradoxical, because the "surveillance" aspects (face recognition algorithms are usually used together with surveillance cameras) here are not used to try to identify a suspect or a criminal, but to capture a group people with similar somatic expressions. The resulting scenario is that different elements forming the identities can be remixed, re-contextualized and re-used at will. Facebook data become letters of an unauthorized alphabet to be used to narrate real identities or new identities, forming new characters on a new background.

And this is a potentially open process that anybody can undertake. It becomes more tempting when we realize the vast amount of people who are smiling. When we smile in our profile picture, we are truly smiling at everyone on Facebook.
So any user can easily duplicate any personal picture on his/her hard disk and then upload it somewhere else with different data. The final step is to be aware that almost everything posted online can have a different life if simply recontextualized.

Facebook, an endlessly cool place for so many people, becomes at the same time a goldmine for identity theft and dating - unfortunately, without the user's control. But that's the very nature of Facebook and social media in general. If we start to play with the concepts of identity theft and dating, we should be able to unveil how fragile a virtual identity given to a proprietary platform can be. And how fragile enormous capitalization based on exploiting social systems can be. And it'll eventually mutate, from a plausible translation of real identities into virtual management, to something just for fun, with no assumed guarantee of trust, crumbling the whole market evaluation hysteria that surrounds the crowded, and much hyped, online social platforms.


/excerpt