Bono Teaches Lesson on Facebook Privacy

Posted by Nick O'Neill on October 30th, 2008 3:35 PM

Earlier this week Bono made headlines after photos of him partying with two 19 year old girls in St. Tropez surfaced on Facebook. The photos were taken by Andrea Feick and apparently were published to her profile. Sophos security has concluded that the reason these images surfaced was that Andrea Feick did not update her privacy settings and as a result, other people in her geographic network were able to view her profile and photos.

The National Business Review has pointed to a Facebook page which is publically viewable even to those not logged into Facebook. How are the photos viewable even to non-users? Well, they were posted to what has become a fan page for Andrea Feick, a previous unknown party planner. It’s unknown who actually created the fan page, but these appear to be copies of the original images that were initially posted.

Sophos described the exposure of Andrea’s photos as a “privacy flaw”. I’d actually call it an issue with people being unaware of the default privacy settings on Facebook. Unfortunately most users are unaware of Facebook’s default privacy settings. While granular privacy controls have become a default component of most large social networks, many users still fail to educate themselves about what settings are available.

Bono learned a lesson about hanging out with 19 year old girls. I’d imagine that most girls that age (or any age to be perfectly honest) would love to brag about hanging out with one of the best known celebrities worldwide. Facebook only helped to amplify the backlash followed by the media piling on. It’s unfortunate for Bono but I can’t say that I feel bad for him as he was partying on a yacht in St. Tropez.

-Bono Facebook Screenshot-

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 3:35 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Bono Teaches Lesson on Facebook Privacy”

Anonymous - October 30th, 2008 at 4:14 pm

“many users still fail to educate themselves about what settings are available.”

Let’s face it: It’s a user experience problem. Not the fault of users, but of Facebook.

Chris - October 30th, 2008 at 8:45 pm

I actually posted a bug report of this exact issue 2.5 months ago.

After a lot of email correspondence with facebook i found that this functionality was not available and was an inability to view privacy settings to people who were not on your friend list.

hxxp://bugs.developers.facebook.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2984

bug report