Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life. Whether you want to or not.

  • What is Openbook?

    Openbook draws attention to the information Facebook makes public about its users via its search API. Facebook exposed this service on April 21st, 2010.

    Our goal is to get Facebook to restore the privacy of this information, so that this website and others like it no longer work.

    If you have questions, or are a media person, you can email Will and Peter at: facepalm.inquiries@gmail.com

    This website is a parody, and has no relationship to Facebook.

  • What has Facebook done wrong?

    Facebook has made two clear mistakes here. First, they do not do a good job of indicating how public each piece of information you share on the site will be.

    Second, they change the rules far too often. If you understood Facebook's privacy settings two years ago (or even six months ago) that information would be worse than useless with today's bewildering settings.

  • Do I need to be logged into Facebook?

    No! Anybody can search, even if they don't have a Facebook account. However, if you do have a Facebook account, you get the added bonus of fulling profile pages when you click on a user.

  • What should I do with my Facebook account?

    You could fix your privacy settings or delete your account altogether.

  • How can I tell what information Facebook is sharing about me?

    There is a project here to make this information clear: http://www.rabidgremlin.com/fbprivacy/. However be warned that it does require that you trust the author of that project.

  • Who are we?

    We are three Facebook users concerned about privacy. We work as software engineers and designers in San Francisco.

  • Who built Openbook? How? When?

    Concept and Code by Will Moffat and Peter Burns.
    Design by James Home.
    Icons by Fat Cow and Ajaxload.
    Hosted on the awesome GitHub pages.

    Openbook is a pure client-side HTML, JS and CSS app that makes simple requests to the Facebook API. We started working on it late Wednesday night (May 12th 2010) and had the site working within an hour or two. Since then the only substantive changes we've made have been to the design and presentation.

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