SN analysis: Facebook ("see friendship" button)

EDIT: I have actually found that there is a sort of search engine in order to access the details of your friends' relationships, so all the advices contained in this article are useless. Some reflections are still interesting, so feel free to go on reading!

You may have noticed that the "see wall-to-wall" button has recently been replaced with a new one: the "see friendship" button.

Previously the first let you see all the wall posts that two of your friends sent each other, now the second shows many more aspects in the interaction between them.

With the new one you can see the events they attended together, the photos where they are both tagged, the things they both like, and so on!

The only way to access this feature is to be friend with both of them, you can find it under a wall post that one sent to the other and it works also with old wall posts, so you can search an older one and watch all the past interactions between them.

Is it really necessary to make a list all of the privacy problems that could rise because of this simple button? Just try to think to some possible scenarios. We could talk a lot about this matter, but this is not the purpose of this article. I would like to point out some ways to avoid revealing our private informations with this new feature.

This is only the latest instrument that Facebook provided to us in order to snoop in our friends lives, but it seems to be the most effective, also because I haven't found yet a way to get rid of it.

There are two things that could be done in order to avoid the most damage possible from this feature: delete your account or disabling wall posting by your friends and delete previous wall posts you made on your friends' walls.

Since I don't think most of you want to delete your accounts, the second solution looks like the most fair.

In order to do this you have to go to your privacy settings and disable the "friends can post on my wall" checkbox. You'll have to delete the previous posts you made on their walls by yourself.

I know that many of you use the wall in order to send small messages, but luckily Facebook provides many other instruments to do that without compromising your privacy, for example their custom mail (which apparently is the only one thing that keeps me from deleting my account), the chat and link tagging.

An alternative could be to spam Facebook's support center with requests of providing an option to disable the button, but until then (if ever Facebook crew cared of user feedback) you would be uncovered.

This instrument seems to be the ultimate social engineering tool.

Don't you know what am I talking about? Stay tuned for more on this blog.