Facebook Ticker lets non-friends snoop on you

Facebook’s Ticker, the Twitter-like feature that shows Friends’ status updates in real time, may be used to let non-friends snoop on Facebook users, a Brazilian researcher said. A post on The Hacker News Saturday quoted Nelson Novaes Neto as saying this was not a bug but an issue related to users’ privacy. “This new feature (Ticker) does not respect the privacy settings and it now Comments (updates), add friends, likes and can be seen by others (friend *) anyone without your permission," it quoted Neto as saying. Neto used four Facebook profiles to prove his concept. His test scenario involved a woman cheating on her husband on Facebook. In the scenario, the wife started communicating with her ex-boyfriend, but blocked new updates from automatically being published on her Wall so her husband would not know. But with Ticker, a friend of the couple saw the updates of the wife indicating she had added the ex-boyfriend to her Friends list. “The husband checked the profile of the wife, but found nothing there. His friend said that this new tool (Ticker) lets you see updates from anyone on your list of friends, as well as users that have been noted for his friends," The Hacker News quoted Neto as saying. In an English translation of his blog post, Neto said he reported this issue to the Facebook Security team a few months back but so far has not received any feedback from them. “In my view and opinion, this new feature of Facebook goes completely against the desire, knowledge and consent of users. We need to share this information so that all users are aware of the risk, if you also consider this a risk to society and users." Neto said. — TJD, GMA News