Facebook privacy settings are complex, to say the least, and to make things even more complicated than they already are, FB team continues to change it every few months. It is important to understand and remember that everything that you do on Facebook, from liking and sharing a post to uploading your private pictures and videos, is being recorded and stored in a dataset on Facebook’s servers. What happens when someone wants to find your Facebook public information? How do you know how much you are letting the world see?

This is where this creepy sounding website comes into the picture. StalkScan.com. As the name suggests, the tool will allow you to stalk yourself. How convenient and creepy at the same time! Though I am not a fan of the name or the service that it provides for obvious reasons, there are ways you can use it to protect yourself using this tool.

How StalkScan Work? Hint: Facebook APIs!

It is important to note that StalkScan is able to access all this data on any profile using Facebook’s own APIs. This means that Facebook is itself making this data accessible and available for hackers and stalkers to collect. Not cool. If you are not careful enough, you might be a victim of ID theft, privacy infringement or worse. There have been cases of broken engagements and marriages over social media posts, people getting fired for sharing the wrong pic with the wrong crowd and cyber-bullying has claimed lives. This is a serious issue and you must go through your profile and make sure that your Facebook public information is exactly what you want it to be.

Stalkscan will retrieve publicly available information such as comments, tags, profile information, people you are friends with, your interest like music, movies, books, etc; places you have been to; events, pictures, and videos you have uploaded and much much more. As you can see, pretty much your entire life that you may have posted and shared on Facebook is for others to judge. Don’t be a victim. Take control.

Let us begin.

Accessing Facebook Public Information

Visit StalkScan.com. Simply enter the Facebook profile URL you want to check, in this case, yours or one of your family member’s profile URL/link, and StalkScan will retrieve data from Facebook’s servers using their publicly available API keys.

With so much data at your fingertips, things can quickly get confusing. That is why, when you enter the profile link and hit enter, the data is neatly sorted into types and categories. For a moment, you will feel nothing happened.

When you hit enter, you see a message that says “Profile #xxxxxxxxxxxx loaded!”. Here, xxx is the profile id in number. Scroll below and click on any of the links like photos, tags, videos or something else.

When you click on the link, you will be taken to the respective page on Facebook that contains the relevant data. So if you clicked on groups, you will be taken to a Facebook page that will contain a list of all the groups that person has joined.

This is a very handy tool because it will allow you to see what “private” Facebook public information are you sharing with the world. This is a great tool to test your profile for leaks and possible remedies. We do not recommend this tool to stalk others on Facebook and use their private “publicly” available Facebook information in any way. Respect other people’s privacy as you respect your own.

So, what happens when you find something that you want to stay hidden but is publicly viewable? Simply visit the video, post, image, tag or anything in question and change it’s setting to “only me” or “friends only” depending on what you want it to be. You can also remove the content in question by deleting it to be on the safe side. If you want to change settings for the entire profile or change settings in bulk, visit the privacy settings of your profile. You can use this to change settings profile-wide instead of having to change every post one by one. Double check everything to make sure you got it right.

Let us know in the comments below whether you found the tool useful.