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Fairfax Media's Ben Grubb brought the news to the world earlier today in an article worth reading, entitled 'Thousands unwittingly revealing phone numbers online', and explained how event invitations and requests for mobile numbers to repopulate a new phone to replace a lost one are seeing numbers made publicly available.
The report explained how it is possible to search with the term 'mobile' in Facebook and find the mobile numbers of thousands of teenagers across Australia, and said the numbers are searchable because the event invitations aren't being set by Facebook users to 'private', and are thus able to be easily searched by others on Facebook.
Instead of an event invite asking their friends to respond, the report notes that Facebook users could be choosing safe behaviour by asking their friends to send their details via private message or, safer still, by using one's own voice via a good ol' phone call to give your friend the missing contact details.
In this instance, users being unaware of the need to set the right privacy settings is at play, rather than Facebook having newly made some changes to the way it does things which is often followed up by with an apology of some kind.
After all, Facebook is not shy to ask for forgiveness rather than permission when it comes to its users and the data Facebook collects and generates with its ginormous user database and myriad of activities available on the Facebook network.
Clearly, many Facebook users are still blasé or ignorant of the need to protect their information online just as much as they do their possessions offline in the real world.
I've read it declared that 'Privacy is dead in the age of Facebook' and that we should 'get used to it', but should we?
I believe that few truly want to lose their privacy when they really understand what it means to have lost it, and while there are very many benefits to living a socially networked and digitally connected iLife, I believe that we will figure out how to do so without giving everyone else, from your neighbours, to the Government, to Facebook or others carte blanche access into every aspect of our lives.
We're clearly not there yet, and have a long way to go, but what the latest Facebook privacy stumble shows is that users are just as responsible for setting up and using the privacy options as Facebook is for doing much more to proactively provide as safe and as private an online network as possible, something both sides need to focus more of attention on.
It really still is the wild, wild web - and it's only getting wilder, so as always, be prepared, learn how to protect your privacy online, be proactive, and you won't end up a victim.
