Facebook’s new system for connecting together the web seems to have a serious privacy hole, a web developer has discovered.

Some people report that they are able to see the public “events” that Facebook users have said they will attend – even if they person is not a “friend” on the social network.

The discovery was made by Ka-Ping Yee, a software engineer for the charitable arm of Google, who was trying out the search query system known as the “Graph API” released by Facebook last Friday. In some cases – though not all – it will let you see the public events that people have said they will attend, or have attended.

Facebook, Famous Social Networking

Yee demonstrated the flaw by showing how the API – which plugs directly into Facebook’s databases – can show you a list of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s planned public events.

Yee says that he was very disturbed by the discovery – because there seemed to be no way to prevent the events from appearing on the API, which is publicly accessible, except by saying you were “not attending” an event. (more…)

Tags: API, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, Privacy, social networking