If you are a facebook addict and you use facebook at every place on earth where you find an internet connection, then probably you are actually doing something equivalent to printing your all your personal information, photos, chats etc in a news paper which is distributed free.

Yes! facebook does not use something called ssl for sending and receiving the data to/from its webservers. SSL is an encryption technique used to send the data securely over the web so that others cannot read the data which one is transmitting or receiving.

Normally when we send data on web it passes through several special computers called as  'routers' which are controlled by different entities and it is quite possible someone may be reading the data which sent to facebook.com or which is coming from facebook.com. 

There is a bigger risk when someone is using the facebook over a public/shared networks like free wifi or in  offices, school, or cyber cafe, airports etc etc. Since these networks  are shared by many people, therefore others who are in same sub network can easily snoop the data going to or coming from facebook.

Routers are managed by corporations but public networks are more risky as anyone who wants to capture data can come and have their piece of cake.

So next time when you are sharing some picture on an album or chatting with a friend or sending a private message beware of the fact that you are actually publishing it on a news paper which any body can come and read. Even if you are using facebook in secured network, its quite possible that one of your hundreds of friends may be using a public network to connect to facebook.

Here is part of a packet capture where facebook page is requesting the server to send chat history to populate the chat window and facebook server sending the entire chat history in plain text. I have removed the user information from this message. 

GET /ajax/chat/history.php?__a=1&id=661349316 HTTP/1.1

This the part of response having chat history 

for (;;);{"error":0,"errorSummary":"","errorDescription":"","errorIsWarning":false,"silentError":0,"payload":{"history":[{"msg":{"text":"hello"},"from":661349316,"to":100000497118916,"time":1294596869088,"type":"msg"}],"userInfo":{"name":"XXXXXX XXXXXX","firstName":"XXXXXX","thumbSrc":"http:\/\/profile.ak.fbcdn.net\/hprofile-ak-snc4\/hs462.snc4\/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.jpg","type":"friend"},"fls":