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

Openbook lets you search public Facebook updates using Facebook's own search service.

Facebook's bait-and-switch on privacy and their overly complex settings cause many users to post messages intended for their friends to 'everybody'.

That's the entire planet, for all time. This privacy-malfunction could have serious consequences if you're looking for a job, applying for college, or trying to get medical insurance.

View our privacy proposal

• Make it easy to control and understand your privacy settings.
• Promise that they won't change them behind your back.
• Make new accounts private by default.

It wouldn't be hard to provide simple, clear groups of privacy settings. Here's our simple proposal.

Will Moffat, Peter Burns and James Home, Facebook users concerned about privacy. We're website developers based in San Francisco.

Questions and media enquiries are welcome: email us, or follow us on Twitter.

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

PRI Here and NowOne of the most troubling and tongue-in-cheek ones that launched this week. NPR (1) On The MediaScrolling the results, complete with names and profile photos, is pretty horrifying. NPR (2) All Things ConsideredThe results are mesmerizing. Wall Street Journal ... programmers have taken to exposing Facebook privacy issues. A site called YourOpenBook.org searches the public status updates of users... Channel 4 News Time New Site Sifts Through Sensitive Facebook Statuses Daily Mail ... some of the people who didn't notice that default settings increasingly allowed more of their data to be visible, the results have been devastating. The quotes I used at the beginning of this article were gleaned from www.youropenbook.org, a website set up ten days ago by three disgruntled computer programmers in San Francisco. Metafilter KokuRyuIt's pretty fucking annoying to have to routinely examine my FB privacy settings to see if Mark Zuckerberg has decided to install some new snooping application, or disable my privacy settings in some way. Sure, some people are oversharing, but it's only because Facebook changes the rules and doesn't tell anyone when they do it. The Register The site neatly illustrates the privacy perils of making status updates and wall posts viewable ... thenextwave It’s worth checking out an application called openbook ABC News A new Web site called Openbook makes it easier than ever to search for the most embarrassing status updates to grace all of Facebook. ReadWriteWeb Think your Facebook profile is private? You had better double-check. A new website provides a voyeuristic look into the once-private social network by making Facebook status updates searchable. Search Engine Land Want to see what people share on Facebook with the entire world — perhaps without realizing it? There’s a new site that makes this easy, Openbook. Wired (1) And if you care to see examples of people who probably ought to use the tool, head to Openbook, which lets you search through the status updates that people had published using the everyone setting. (And by everyone, Facebook means the entire web, not just everyone in your contact list). Some fascinating and damning results... Wired (2) Facebook’s getting lots of advice these days on how to get out of the current jam .... One of the best is a call from .... Openbook San Francisco Examiner Gawker new media age Socialbrite The Guardian ... an ingenious site which allows you to type in a search phrase. It then ransacks the publicly available Facebook "status updates" and displays what it finds. FlowingData PC Pro Sun Sentinel NBC Bay Area PC World The Consumerist Star News Online TechCrunch The Command Line Education for the Driving Masses The Tech Herald Community 2.0 K‑State Libraries TGDaily Le Soir

No! Anybody can search, even if they don't have a Facebook account. However, if you are logged into your Facebook account, you'll see full profile pages when you click on a user.

ReclaimPrivacy.org has an excellent tool that will show you what is public about your profile, and makes it very simple and easy to secure your privacy settings.

It looks that way. The search delete facebook account is more popular than it's ever been on Google.

No. We are using Facebook's documented APIs. It's a completely public API that any programmer can use.

Application Programmer Interface - is a way to access data on a site. Openbook simply takes this raw data provided by the Facebook API and presents it in a human-readable form. For example compare "beach" on the Facebook API and then on youropenbook.org

If you can help us out, then please let us know which languages you speak. Thanks!

Concept and Code by Will Moffat and Peter Burns.
Design by James Home.
Icons by Fat Cow and Ajaxload.

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.

The site's been up for less than 2 weeks but we've had almost 6m page views already. Just over a million people from 200+ countries have spent a total of 10.1 years on the site!