San Fransisco, CA -- (SBWire) -- 08/07/2012 --Facebook currently has 955 million users as of June 2012. Many of these users have a poor understanding of the privacy settings on their social network pages, including Twitter and others, and this can lead to information being made publicly available that individuals might prefer to keep between ‘friends’. WhatPeopleSayOnline harvests publicly available posts from popular social networks and anonymizes them to demonstrate the volume of private information that is daily being made public to those who know where to look.

WhatPeopleSayOnline is a new site that collates posts from Facebook and Twitter, anonymizing the content in order to protect the original posters and displaying them on its homepage. The content can be filtered through several readily available categories, including keywords, themes (“People who are hungover”, “People about their family”) and time added.

The site harvests over 350,000 updates every day, and deletes them after a period of 24 hours to start the process again, revealing the extraordinary amount of content being made publicly available by unwitting social network users.

The site updates every three minutes, and has several features to experiment with the data, including a “vs” function in which you can test the comparative popularity of competing topics like cats and dogs, or bacon and cheese, to see which comes out on top. The site also features links to resources where users can find out more about online privacy, including tips and tricks to maximize privacy settings and make sure content is not being shared without their knowledge.

A spokesperson for WhatPeopleSayOnline explained, “The project tries to raise awareness for online privavy in a fun and hopefully eye-opening way. It shows that, without sufficient privacy settings, everything you say on social networks may be viewed all around the world instantly, by anyone.”

About WhatPeopleSayOnline
WhatPeopleSayOnline aggregates thousands of public posts from Facebook and Twitter daily. All entries are anonymized, displayed in different categories and automatically deleted after 24 hours, giving a constantly shifting portrait of the online landscape. For more information please visit: http://www.whatpeoplesayonline.com/