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Revealing your Facebook profile.

Facebook is going public today. Lots of rich people are about to get even richer. You’ve probably heard it all already. So here’s something Facebook-related that you might not know…

A photo saved from Facebook will, by default, end up with a filename something like this:

370048_10158076517632008_636521329_22084781_71286451_n.jpg

That looks fairly random, doesn’t it? Quite innocuous. Only, the 9 digit number in the middle there is a unique Facebook profile ID. Stick that number on the end of the following URL…

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=

…and you’ll meet the owner of the FB account the picture originally came from.

Yep, that’s right. If you save a photo from Facebook, the name automatically given to that file includes your Facebook profile ID. So if you don’t rename that photo before sharing it1 you’re basically giving away the address to your Facebook account.

Of course, you probably have your Facebook privacy settings ramped right up, so nobody is going to see anything other than your name. But, still, i think it’s worth noting that this sort of thing is possible and worth trying to make people aware of what they might be revealing.

…

PS. I completely forgot to mention OpenBook, which beautifully highlights how much info some people give away on Facebook.

  1. A quick google image search for “_n.jpg” suggests that plenty of people do this. ↩