Facebook ID Probe Shows Things Getting Worse

An anonymous reader writes "According to Sophos, Facebook users are getting sloppier with their personal info, not better. Revisiting a 2007 survey in which a plastic frog got 87 hits out of 200 friend requests, this time a rubber duck and a cat got 87 out of 200 friend requests, plus a bonus 8 friends who decided to trust them anyway. The research also suggests that older Facebook users are sloppier than the young, being keener to build their list of friends. (The older users had more than 4x the friends each, on average, than the young.)"

Promoters

[boxxa]

I am also seeing that more and more people are calling them promoters and advertisers by adding 1,000 friends on there and don't realize the information they are disclosing. The biggest example is the Palin email account hacking that most of the answers to security questions was found in her Facebook.

Re:Here is a crazy idea

[Sockatume]

In principle, the information is only visible to a pre-defined list of other users, your "friends". The point of the article is that that list is often composed with only its social function in mind, with a disregard for its security function.

Re:Nah - I think you can blame Mafia Wars, Farmvil

[Buelldozer]

I assigned all of my "game friends" into their own group and then used Facebooks group security to limit the personal information that they can see. It took all of five minutes to setup. Someone in that group can see as much information about me as someone who isn't my friend at all, which is to say not much.

Now I'll accept every friend request that comes my way. If I don't recognize the name and the friend doesn't leave a note saying how they know me then I push them into the game friend group. Problem solved.

I'm friends with a Turkey, but it's restricted

[SuperBanana]

TFA is full of shit- their rubber ducky was probably friended, but put on a restrictive friend list.

I'm friends with a famous turkey (long story), but said turkey is on a restricted friend list that can see barely more than my public info. I guarantee you every kid has a restricted list of one sort or another.

Also, did they bother to track how many people friended it just enough to check it out, and then unfriended it?

Re:Olders users know more people?

[shadwstalkr]

Actually it's "When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years." -- Mark Twain

Re:Nah - I think you can blame Mafia Wars, Farmvil

[eln]

Keep in mind that the game itself still has access to all of your information. The Facebook terms of service prohibits the game from using or storing that information for anything not game-related, but there's nothing other than the honor system and Facebook's vague threats to occasionally enforce the rules that prevents it from doing so. The API itself will happily grant access to everything, whether the game needs it or not.

Your best bet, if you must play FB games, is to maintain an entirely separate profile just for that purpose, and put nothing personally identifiable on it.

Re:not for nothing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Above certain numbers, sample size isn't really majorly important. Toss a coin 200 times and you'll see that the average number of heads stays relatively constant above a sample size of 100. Also, whether the population size is 1 million or 350 million, it really makes no difference to how big a sample you need.