Category: Geekery

Bought two new hard drives to add to my Linux box. Could only find one of the two SATA cables that I thought I had, so I went to FrozenCPU.com today to pick up some new ones. Got home, opened up the computer and found the missing SATA cable, and also discovered that there is only one power connector free. So tomorrow I’ll have to stop by FrozenCPU.com again to buy an adaptor. Fortunately they’re in East Rochester, and so is my physiotherapist, so it won’t be a wasted trip. But it does mean another day of failed backup jobs because I don’t have the extra disk space.

Facebook has a personal “Phonebook” for your account. A couple of people have seen this and thought “Oh my God, Facebook has information I never gave it”. I’m not so sure this is correct. As far as I can tell, the information there is a combination of information other people have added to their account plus information I have shared. Based on my observations, it appears the information they’re showing me is either

• Phone numbers I already had
• Phone numbers that my Facebook friends share with their friends
• Phone numbers that people who aren’t Facebook friends share with the public
• And in some cases, phone numbers I already had combined correlated with the FB profiles of people who have put their phone number in the protected part of their profile

I cannot find a single instance of it divulging a phone number to me from a stranger. But I can see why people might be a little surprised about that last part. I’m not.

I use a phone operating system, WebOS, that integrates all my contacts from Google, from information I imported from my old Palm Treo, from LinkedIn, and also information it downloads from Facebook. This is kind of cool, because when I get a phone call from a Facebook friend I get their Facebook profile picture showing up on the screen. It also means I don’t have to grovel through multiple sources to get all the information I know about somebody. I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised that some of that information made it up to Facebook. I can’t recall for sure, but I might have also used one of Facebook’s “Find your friends, upload your contacts” things. I’ve also set up various links between Google contacts and Apple Address Book and the like, so it’s damn near impossible to find where the data came from.

So here are some observations on what data they have, and what data they don’t have.

Case 1: My FB friend Dennis Mike was worried because when he looks at his phonebook, it shows his cell phone number which he doesn’t think he’s every shared with FB. I don’t have his phone number in my phone, and he doesn’t show in the FB Phonebook for me. So it’s not sharing his phone number with people who didn’t already have it, even FB friends.

Case 2: It shows my daughter’s phone number (which is information I already had) linked to my daughter’s FB profile with a “Add as friend” link. (She unfriended me a while ago, long story.) I assume that this is combining information I already had (her phone number) with information that Facebook got from her profile and decided “aha, this Facebook profile is a person you already know”. She may not be disclosing her phone number to non-friends, but FB decided that’s information I already have.

Case 3: It shows my brother’s phone number, but it’s not linked to his profile, in spite of the fact that we’re FB friends. I think that means that he never linked his phone to FB, and because his name on my phone is different than his name on FB (Dave versus David) it doesn’t manage to find the link.

Case 4: It shows a guy who I had some business dealings with, full name, linked to his Facebook profile with an “Add as a friend” link. In my phone, I have his number and his name as “Dave @ [company name]”. So I guess this is another example of FB correlating a phone number in my phone with a phone number that somebody put in the protected part of his profile.

I guess my point of this investigation is that Facebook has some information, and they’re able to do some correlations on this. What’s visible seems pretty innocuous, and it really does help you find the FB profiles of people you know. I see this feature as a good thing, both because of the way it helps you and because it gives you some insight into the sorts of correlations that it’s possible they’re doing behind your back and not exposing to the general public. As they say on Angry Mac Bastards, if a business isn’t charging you money, it’s because you’re not the customer, you’re the product.

Google has a blog post showing how they set up some fake search results, and then a short time later Bing started returning the same fake results, and therefore they suspect IE8’s “Suggested Sites” and/or Bing’s “Customer Experience Improvement Program” is spying on what you click and sending the results off to Microsoft.

But before Google gets all high and mighty, I want to tell you about what happened to me. I did some documentation for a customer I was doing some work for. I did it in the form of a TiddleyWiki and stuck it up on a brand new, never used before subdomain of my main domain. Well, she hated it and asked that I do it as a Word document instead, which I did. But I forgot to take it down. No problem, I thought, after all nothing links to it or mentions it in any public place, so how would a crawler find it?

Imagine my surprise when the customer calls me up some time later saying that this old version of the documentation, in a subdirectory on a un-linked to site is showing up in Google searches for her product’s name. How did that happen? Using the advanced search, I couldn’t find anything that linked to it. There was one mention of that domain in a forum post, but in that case I was using the :8080 port because I was referring to the Tomcat server that was also running on that domain.

So as I see it, the choices are:

• Google saw the mention of the domain in the middle of a forum post, recognized it as a URL (it wasn’t a link) and stripped out the :8080 and crawled the site OR
• They saw me mention the url in a link I send in a GMail to the customer and used that as an excuse to crawl the site.
• IE reported the link to Bing when the customer clicked on it and then Google stole it from Bing somehow
• Chrome reported the link to Google when I clicked on it

Either way, they’re crawling things that aren’t public links. Me thinks Google protest too much.

If you use Google Chrome as your web browser, right click on the address bar, and choose “Edit Search Engines”. You’ll discover that every web site you’ve ever been to with a search box, including this blog, installed as a “Search Engine”. And you can search that site by typing the domain name (like blog.xcski.com) followed by a space followed by your search terms. (I haven’t tested to see if “Clear Browsing History” clears this as well, but if it doesn’t, that might be a surprise if you think you’ve cleared your tracks)

But another interesting use of this is that you can change the short cut. So if I double click on the entry for Wikipedia, and change the “Keyword” from “en.wikipedia.org” to “wiki”, I can search Wikipedia by typing command-L to highlight the current address in the address bar, then typing “wiki Stephen Fry” and hitting return, and going directly to the Wikipedia page about Stephen Fry.

Lifehacker has an article about some other ways you can use this Search Engine capability to be able to do things like enter a Google Calendar event from the address bar.