People Sure Like This Creepy Site That Makes Your Facebook Status Public

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After 27 hours up and running this stalker website with the appropriately creepy name We Know What You're Doing ...  has gotten over 100,000 unique visitors, according to a tweet from 18-year-old founder Callum Haywood, which says something disturbing about our society. Taking advantage of some Facebook users' loose security settings, the site pulls public Facebook updates and categorizes them under four demoralizing columns: "Who wants to get fired?," "Who's taking drugs?," "Who's hungover?," and "Who's got a new phone number?" As you can see to the right, some embarrassing stuff ends up on there, for the public to mock and judge. The whole thing is quite humiliating, yet people can't look away.

Though we find it horrifying, Callum is trying to make a point. He calls it an "experiment" on the site, an admittedly cruel way to prove that the average user misunderstands their privacy on the social network. "Just make sure your Facebook privacy settings are sufficient, for example don’t publish status updates containing potentially risky material as ‘Public’ because then they have a good chance of showing up in the public Graph API," he writes on the site. "The problem is how people simply don’t understand the risks of sharing everything," he continues.

Sure, Callum has a point, but he also adds the kicker "... and we think you should stop," bringing a judgmental edge to this little exercise. It's worth noting that Callum isn't the first to do this. Back in 2010 two guys created FacebookSearch, a site that takes status updates and makes them public. "This is a simple example of just how open facebook has made your information. This data is wide open, and this is one of the least scary uses that anyone will make. If nothing changes, it’s only to get worse," they wrote on the site. Two years later, as Facebook has grown even bigger, their point has clearly not been taken.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.