When the Most Personal Secrets Get Outed on Facebook

A look at the casualties of a privacy loophole on Facebook—the fact that anyone can be added to a group by a friend without their approval. As a result, these people lose control over their secrets, even though they may be sophisticated users who attempted to use Facebook's privacy settings to shield some of their activities. In the era of social networks like Facebook and Google Inc.'s Google+, companies that catalog people's activities for a profit routinely share, store and broadcast everyday details of people's lives. This creates a challenge for individuals navigating the personal-data economy: how to keep anything private in an era when it is difficult to predict where your information will end up.