Easily View Hidden Facebook Photo Albums

In a previous post, I noted that Facebook had removed access to photo albums for any user not your friend. Soon after Facebook rolled out new privacy controls, some users noticed that they could view anyone’s photo albums marked visible to “everyone,” most notably a few from Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg. Soon after those reports, however, it appeared that the albums were no longer available, as “Photos” tabs disappeared from public profiles and visiting photos.php simply gave an error message.

But as I described, access had not been cut off – Facebook had simply made the albums harder to find. This practice, known as security through obscurity, can mislead users who think their hidden content is safe from prying eyes. To prove my point, I gave directions on how to load the public photo albums of any given Facebook user.

Those directions were a bit technical, however, and I wanted to make the point more obvious. After working through more Facebook code, I came up with a bookmarklet (a bit of JavaScript you can store as a bookmark in your browser) for viewing public photo albums. Bookmark this link, or copy the code below. (Tested in recent versions of Opera, Firefox, and Chrome.)

javascript:(function(){function y(){if(x.readyState==4){q=x.responseText.substring(9);p=eval(‘(‘+q+’)’);document.getElementById(‘tab_canvas’).innerHTML=p.payload.tab_content;}}x=window.XMLHttpRequest?new window.XMLHttpRequest:(window.ActiveXObject?new ActiveXObject(“MSXML2.XMLHTTP”):null);x.onreadystatechange=y;x.open(‘POST’,’http://www.facebook.com/ajax/profile/tab.php’,true);x.send(‘id=’+ProfileURIController._profileId+’&v=photos&__a=1′);})()

Once you’ve saved the link, simply visit someone’s public Facebook profile, then load the bookmarklet. It will replace the body of the user’s profile with a list of links to public albums, if any are available. The results are not formatted well, and only include the first page of albums, but the code works enough to at least demonstrate that public albums are not as well-hidden as you might expect.

I’ve browsed through some random profiles, as well as some more prominent Facebook users, and I think many would be surprised by how many photos I was able to access through this trick. Note that this code does not circumvent privacy settings in any way – it simply makes visible albums you can rightfully access but that Facebook has hidden from view otherwise.

At some point, users who have followed default album settings in the past and left many photos accessible to “everyone” are in for a shock when they realize the implications of those choices. I personally think it best for them to realize that now instead of later, which is why I decided to release this technique.

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