It’s a common story - you access Facebook’s privacy settings and lock down your account, to prevent your data falling into the wrong hands. But how much of your activity, in spite of changing those settings, is still public? Well, a Belgian white hat hacker made the site ‘Stalkscan’ to find out.

This self-described “ethical hacker” has utilised the power of Facebook’s Graph Search tool, demonstrating just how alarmingly powerful and privacy-invading the tool is. Simply enter your Facebook account’s URL (don’t worry, your details are safe), and Stalkscan will perform some granular searches for particular items of information.

Stalkscan searches for photos, events attended, pictures of single people that you’ve liked, comments you have left on videos and the political parties liked by my friends.

So naturally, I’ve loaded mine up. Unfortunately, it turns out this cracker of a photo is publicly available from my tender age of 16.

It was certainly an eye-opening experience, and it’s one that will help reinforce the importance of understanding that privacy on Facebook doesn’t protect all of your data…

Some items will always remain public, but you probably don’t even know them:

• If you select your attendance to a public event, whether you’re “going” or “interested” is available to all.
• Photos of you, taken by others will be public (depending on their privacy settings).
• What you like is public.
• What you comment on (depending on their privacy settings) is public.
• Metadata around these public items are viewable by all, such as your age or where you live.

If you care about your privacy, just take extra care.