Facebook's privacy issues are numerous and well-documented, from software "glitches" to decisions that take control away from users. Despite that, it is a still-growing force in the modern Internet and is currently trying to position itself as the gateway to the "social Web" for its 500 million users.
What can we, as hackers, do to protect the privacy of those millions?
This panel walks through a few existing projects that apply software skills to the privacy challenges that Facebook presents, from working within the system using Facebook's Platform API to adding a layer to the system with browser extensions to presenting a robust open-source alternative to the whole Facebook platform. We'll discuss how these different tools fit into various strategies to alter or replace Facebook's existing privacy regime and what other approaches might be successful in protecting privacy on Facebook and other user networks.