Your Facebook friends list, as Mashable revealed last week, is not as private as it claims to be. Setting your list privacy to "Only Me" doesn't actually mean that nobody can see who you're connected to, because there's a loophole anyone can exploit. The loophole comes in the shape of Facebook's mutual friends feature. Any user can see the mutual friends between any two other users, so long as one of them has a publicly available friends list. So if you keep your friends list private, but your best friend doesn't, a third party could compare your two lists, and voilà — they'd be able to see all the friends the two of you have in common.
This feature has been in place at Facebook for some time. The company doesn't see it as a problem, and warns users that the privacy of their Friends List is actually dependent on the privacy settings of their connections. But to show how much of a problem it can be, an online security group called CyberInt built a program last week intended to exploit the feature and reconstruct users' private friends lists.
The mutual friends tool is a byproduct of the company's mission to connect the whole world on the platform; the company believes it helps to see which friends you share with other users. But it doesn't afford users as much privacy as they might think they have. To prove that, we put the mutual friends feature to the test with the most famous Facebook user of all: founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg keeps his friends list private, but he is also friends with longtime Facebook employee and head of product Chris Cox, whose friends list is public. Cox and Zuckerberg have 248 shared connections, and thanks to that fact (and further friends list comparisons) we were able to see more than 400 of Zuckerberg's Facebook friends.
Not surprisingly, Zuckerberg is friends with many of Silicon Valleys most prominent tech icons, including dozens of CEOs and VCs and fellow billionaires. It definitely doesn't come as a shock to see Facebook board members like Marc Andreessen and Don Graham, and early employees such as Napster co-founder and former Facebook president Sean Parker, on the list.
But there were also surprises. Included amongst Zuckerberg's list of friends: Robin Li, cofounder of Chinese search engine Baidu, and China's third richest man ($11.1 billion net worth, according to Forbes). Here are some more intriguing names we uncovered:
- Alison Pincus, Cofounder of home decor marketplace One King's Lane (and wife of Zynga cofounder Mark Pincus)
- Barry Diller, Chairman of IAC/InterActiveCorp, media executive
- Ben Horowitz, Cofounder of VC firm Andreessen Horowitz
- Biz Stone, Cofounder of Twitter, CEO and founder of Jelly
- Blake Ross, Co-creator of Mozilla Firefox
- Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb
- Charlie Cheever, Cofounder of Quora
- Dave Goldberg, CEO of SurveyMokey (and Sandberg's husband)
- Dennis Crowley, CEO of Foursquare
- Drew Houston, CEO of Dropbox
- Ev Williams, CEO of Medium, Twitter cofounder
- Jack Dorsey, CEO and founder of Square, Twitter cofounder
- Jack Xu, Co-president and CTO at SINA (owns Sina Weibo, China's version of Twitter)
- Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of Yelp
- John Donahoe, President and CEO of eBay
- Keith Rabois, Venture Capitalist at Khosla Ventures
- Marc Andreessen, Cofounder of VC firm Andreessen Horowitz and Facebook board member
- Qi Lu, Executive VP at Microsoft
- Robin Li, CEO and cofounder at Chinese search company Baidu (China's third richest man)
- Scott Sassa, Former CEO of Friendster
- Sean Parker, Cofounder of Napster, early President at Facebook
- Trip Adler, CEO and cofounder of Scribd
You can't see a connection if both users hide their friends list, as is the case with Zuckerberg and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. We assume the two are friends, but you can't tell by using the mutual friends search. Zuckerberg's full friends list likely features even more intriguing tech connections.
Still, the list is a relatively in-depth look at the personal and professional connections of one of Silicon Valley's most powerful CEOs — and if Facebook doesn't believe the friends list loophole is a problem, then Facebook has to be okay with everyone in the world knowing who Zuckerberg is connected to.
A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment on Zuckerberg's friends list, but did share a statement about the mutual friends tool in general.
"A friendship includes two people, and we give each of those people control over who they share their friends lists with. Of course, friends sometimes disagree on things, maybe even when it comes to who they share things with on Facebook... That's why we not only give people control over who can see their friends list on their Timeline, but we explain prominently that their friends also get to choose who they share with and that they might select a different set of people."
Facebook has not shared any plans to change this mutual friends tool. Unless it does, users should understand that their friends list is just as visible as Zuckerberg's with a bit of digging — even if they set it to be seen by "only me."
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