This is a guest post by Rob Banagale. Rob Banagale is co-founder of Neutrinos, LLC, a digital media company specializing in iPhone application design and consulting based in Boston, MA. Rob advises clients on how they can extend their marketing reach to iPhone users, including the iPhone application publishing process. He has authored a Facebook application and remains interested in the design of social media platforms.

One of the most important parts of a person’s Facebook presence is their profile photo. This is displayed in the top left corner of a page. The photo can be a newly uploaded image or it may be drawn from any of your online albums.

Typically, a profile photo shows someone’s face, and appears in front of the light blue-grey line that connects from the left side of the profile to the left-most tab. View an example of a typical profile page with a normal photo.
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This is a guest post by Joseph Bonneau. Joseph Bonneau is a researcher at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory whose research interests include privacy and security in social networks. He originally reported these vulnerabilities on his group’s research blog, Light Blue Touchpaper.

Facebook has a spotty track record enforcing the privacy of photos posted by users and designated as private. Up until last February, Facebook’s photo security relied on users not being able to craft custom PHP queries, instead of checking login cookies with every photo request. It was only a manner of time before this was hacked in a fairly spectacular way in February 2008, exposing a few personal photos of CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The “temporary flaw” was fixed, only to be hacked again in March, and again in May. The Associated Press picked up the story, Paris Hilton’s name got involved, and Facebook was forced to re-work their photo security and prevent these PHP-style hacks.
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In a small addition to Facebook today, the company launched a new feature which turns photo comments into news feed stories. Previously, I believe that photo comments were automatically published to user feeds but now you have the ability to opt-out of that feed story. This is an addition which emphasizes Facebook’s ongoing commitment to user privacy.
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For those of you who use Facebook albums regularly, you will be happy to learn that Facebook’s 60 photo album limit is being increased. A number of users have been reporting the increase and have sent me photos of albums with hundreds of photos in them. The one pictured below have 175 photos in the Facebook album. There’s no word on how large on an increase it is, or if Facebook has removed the limit all together.
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When they say Facebook helps connect people, they really mean it. Unfortunately there are few ways to disconnect from people aside from removing them completely. This afternoon I loaded up my Facebook and staring at me was the picture of a baby with a cracked skull and the child’s brains leaking out. Does that paint a disgusting enough image for you? Well the image is even more disgusting.
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Earlier this week we posted about Facebook’s ban on breast feeding. The debate has gained a lot of coverage in the media. So much that the CBS early morning show recorded the following segment on the topic. Included in the clip is a section where a group of women have joined together outside of Facebook’s Palo Alto offices, protesting about the breastfeeding policy. They have even put together a short jingle about the issue.

So which party has gone to far in this debate? According to Facebook, not all breastfeeding photos are banned, only those that have fully exposed breasts. Some of the women on the site continue to protest as they wish to have freedom of expression. Jeff Jarvis and the author of “Mama Knows Breast” were called into the early morning show to comment on the issue. You can watch the video below.
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