Facebook ID Probe Shows Things Getting Worse 174
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.)"
Possibly because... (Score:3, Interesting)
Nah - I think you can blame Mafia Wars, Farmville, (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm thinking that a lot of people add folks they don't know into their friends' pile for the applications, esp. games. After all, Mafia Wars and the like are rigged to get you more in-game "power" (more defense, offense, etc) with the larger number of friends you add (and then subsequently add into your "Mafia", or "Neighbors", or "Crew").
Re:Nah - I think you can blame Mafia Wars, Farmvil (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nah - I think you can blame Mafia Wars, Farmvil (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Nah - I think you can blame Mafia Wars, Farmvil (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Does that actually work at the moment? A few months ago myself and a friend had a play with those features and no matter what settings he used I kept being able to see everything I could before we started. Admittedly we didn't report the issues nor have we bothered re-testing (so maybe our experience is just a fluke or a temporary issue at the time).
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Re:Nah - I think you can blame Mafia Wars, Farmvil (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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I personally think the information available to a game should be more restricted and better policed.
Lately I have noticed applications asking for information they didn’t feasibly need, plus asking for the ability to post stories on my wall without prompting me each time. If you don’t give them the permissions they ask for, they ask again until you give permission (or uninstall the app).
I don’t install many applications, but it pisses me off when applications pull this sort of crap. I don
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http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=721 [facebook.com]
In practice, this probably doesn't matter, as long as you don't spam or start making alts, but it's something that has thus far made me uneasy enough to not make that "work account" lest my primary a
Re:Nah - I think you can blame Mafia Wars, Farmvil (Score:5, Funny)
I think you can blame Mafia Wars, Farmville
Thanks for reminding me. I need to harvest my crops!
KH, DW, SI and TW. Cause real games have TLIs (Score:2)
If that person drops me a polite note with the application invite, I usually help out.
I also became friends (The kind you break bread with if you are ever in the same town) with several people I met throgh FB games.
I also add every lo
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That's a trust by default rule. You're relying on Facebook to get the security right, or just to be sure that you keep up with any changes they make to their security model. If I don't know somebody, then they don't get to be on my friend list. And if an app needs access to my personal information, then I block it too. This Mafia thing looks like fun, but the expense is too high.
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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.
Why don't you just ignore the friend request if you don't know them? I don't understand this - why would you want someone on your friends list if they're not a friend, nor even acquaintance?
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Because in many of the Facebooks games, Mafia Wars for example, having a larger clan is a tremendous benefit and the only way people can be in your clan is if you are FB friends with them first.
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Except Facebook apps are harvesting all your personal info and anyone who is your friend, whether they have added the application or not. It's the reason my Application Block List is so long, and I'm not even sure that works to block everything.
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To be honest I wouldn't have either, if I had thought about it first.
Unfortunately I was new to FB when I stated with Mafia Wars and by the time I figured out what adding all of those people was doing to my privacy I was in too deep to want to start over.
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This is it exactly. I haven't been willing to add strangers yet, but the majority of people on Mafia Wars have the required 500 friends, I mean seriously, 500, nobody actually knows that many people.
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If I added everyone I ever met, including summer camp, I probably would.
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Your sig is eerily relevant to your post.
Re:Possibly because... (Score:5, Funny)
Yes and clearly Facebook isn't about "who do you know now", its about "who have you known through your whole life who can come back to haunt you".
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Exactly!
I mean how many people do you know when you are in kindergarten vs.
how many people you know when you are clubbing?
Self correcting problem (Score:1, Insightful)
Good. Let Facebook go the way of the dodo. It's the equivalent of those "personal home pages" people put up when they first discovered the Web.
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Good. Let Facebook go the way of the dodo. It's the equivalent of those "personal home pages" people put up when they first discovered the Web.
I wouldn't say it's equivalent but they do share a little bit of similarity. Facebook, unlike personal home pages, is far more intuitive now than "p.h.p."'s where back in the day. Perhaps it's wider exposure to all things web, or perhaps it's better web technologies and tech. adoption (CSS + JS frameworks + "AJAX").
And the biggest difference, I'd say as both a web developer, a Facebook member, and someone who doesn't really like Facebook, I certainly do appreciate it for the easy as which I found I was ab
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Get off my lawn.
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Really? Let me introduce you to http://www.google.com/ [google.com] and as far as chatting goes, when you email your old pal you say "Hey, are you on AOL instant messenger or MSN Live Messenger or ICQ or Yahoo Messenger or . . . my screen name is foo. Please IM Me I would love to chat. Or better yet, let's be actual humans and talk. my number is 555-555-5555. Call me!"
Of course, if the site was built in frontpage, al
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And if you're hosting an event, you don't want to have to enter 50 numbers in a text message in order to invite people whose participation is only marginally necessary. It's also nice b
Try finding "John Smith" on google (Score:2)
Seriously, have you actaully ever used facebook? Probably half the people I've reconnected with are people I would never have found through online search. Google search won't reveal networks of mutual friends, but it's how a lot of facebook friends find each other.
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Or better yet, let's be actual humans and talk. my number is 555-555-5555. Call me!"
Am I the only one who finds statements like this funny? Holding up "talking on the telephone" as being "actual human", but writing off instant messengers as if it's in some way inferior?
Don't get me wrong, different forms of communications have their place, but the idea that hearing someone's voice is inherently superior to reading what someone writes makes me imagine luddites in the time when telephones were just becoming wide-spread saying something like "Let's be actual humans and talk face-to-face. Dir
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Yeah, google is the best way to find your old friends' Facebook pages. :)
Olders users know more people? (Score:4, Funny)
The older users had more than 4x the friends each, on average, than the young.
It's like older users know more people than younger users, and that's just not possible. Kids know everything, just ask them.
Re:Olders users know more people? (Score:5, Funny)
"When I was 18, I thought my father was the dumbest man on earth. By the time I turned 23, I was amazed what the old man had learned in five years." - Unknown
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Re:Olders users know more people? (Score:5, Informative)
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
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Re:Olders users know more people? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Olders users know more people? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, this is based on a completely unscientific poll of my brain cells, but it seems older users would be more likely to, at least initially, treat sites like Facebook as something new to just try out, a fun toy more than a serious part of their lives, and thus less likely to care that much about how they expose themselves on such a site.
Old people exposing themselves on facebook seems like a far larger problem than than this article speaks of.
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The older users had more than 4x the friends each, on average, than the young.
It's like older users know more people than younger users, and that's just not possible. Kids know everything, just ask them.
More to the point, I don't see why this is an issue. I don't store anything on Facebook that's private and I don't trust any links that anyone that I don't know personally shares with me (not to mention my use of noscript's XSS-busting features). So what do I have to lose in accepting a friend request from a plastic frog, exactly?
Manage a Mosaics Craft Forum (Score:3, Interesting)
I use Facebook to let members of the forum [mosaicands...dglass.org] know if there's a server problem. Most of my 50 or so friends are from the forum with my Facebook Forum page at something over 100 fans. I set up a filter so I can filter out the forum members and get updates from friends and the sites I'm a fan of.
[John]
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How can this get modded Offtopic? This is exactly on the topic.
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It would be on topic if the plastic frog was also doing mosaics crafting.
I remember the little green fellow from an argumentation course, so I added him. He wasn't the brightest but he sur knew how to jump to conclusions. Duckie, on the other hand, kept flunking it.
Useless results (Score:1, Troll)
This proves nothing of any use, since the first probe was done in the UK, and the more recent one in Australia.
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This proves nothing of any use, since the first probe was done in the UK, and the more recent one in Australia.
Sure it does. It shows a disturbing trend among the people of the Commonwealth.
Uhh... (Score:4, Insightful)
From TFS: "The older users had more than 4x the friends each, on average, than the young."
They've also had a lifetime of real life social networking (not the online kind) to boost the level of friends and acquaintances they would like to keep in contact with.
Young people are very cliquey with their behaviour in regards to friends. When I was in school, I could've counted my true friends on my fingers. When I went out into the world and bounced jobs for a couple years, I met many more interesting people that I remained friends with after the jobs had come and gone.
Also, do we really need another article to tell us that the older people in society are less hip to the social network scams?
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You saved me the bother of stating the same thing. All of my friends on Facebook are people I actually know; some I see regularly, others less so. I suspect I still haven't added everyone I used to know and would want to keep up with; I only joined recently.
Unfair Tests (Score:5, Funny)
I'm friends with a Turkey, but it's restricted (Score:3, Informative)
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?
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Re:I'm friends with a Turkey, but it's restricted (Score:5, Insightful)
I still don't understand what the big deal is about finding someone's address and phone number.
Back in Ye Olden Days, when people had telephones that were plugged into walls, all this information was printed in large books distributed free to every customer.
Re:Unfair Tests (Score:4, Funny)
Are they being friended to REAL accounts? (Score:5, Interesting)
I personally have 2 accounts. I use one strictly for games where I will accept any and all takers. I post to lists to increase my numbers and can see from 20 to hundreds of requests per day. That account has no real data.
My other REAL account only has REAL friends and Family. I scrutinize every request and all personal settings are very tight as to only allow friends to see the data. I'd consider myself an 'older' user @ +40. From what I have seen, this is not uncommon.
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I don't have time to waste keeping one account up to date. I can't image keeping track of two. When do you find time to code, hack, and generally do geeky stuff?
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Your fake profile apparently gets more friend requests than my real one. I got a friend request a couple of days ago, and I really don’t remember the last time I got one before that.
Or are you confusing the group/fan/application requests with friend requests? They aren’t the same.
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I've been on Facebook for 9 months now, and haven't gotten a single spam friend request. The only request I've gotten from someone I didn't know was from someone whose blog post I had responded to, and he assumed I was someone he knew since only his friends and family knew about his blog (I found it through a google search). I can only assume that you are using some game or other application that is sharing your info or something.
Here is a crazy idea (Score:5, Insightful)
How about not putting stuff up on social media sites that you wouldn't want posted on a bulletin board at the local laundromat? Why on earth would I post my DOB, address, phone number there for example??
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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.
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Does the article discuss how much info each user leaked? I wouldn't be real surprised if the older users posted less info and were thus less concerned with privacy (It also wouldn't be shocking if they were simply less aware of it).
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Does the article discuss how much info each user leaked? I wouldn't be real surprised if the older users posted less info and were thus less concerned with privacy (It also wouldn't be shocking if they were simply less aware of it).
I guess at 45 I qualify as "older" in this context. I don't post personal details, or say things I don't want my business contacts to be aware of. FB serves the same purpose to me as a cocktail party - it's just a simple social function. I don't really care who wants to be my friend (which I view more as a 'live rolodex') - you never know who might be handy to know. I have about 300 friends on FB. My wife, who's a freelance writer and has to network as part of her business, has over 1500. It's just a
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Could be. I'm an old guy, and I've never posted my phone or address. I do have my birth monthday so people can give me b-day spam at the appropriate time, but no year.
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Why wouldn't you want to make those details handily available to those friends you trust with them? Especially if it means that if you need to change your phone number, many friends will have the new number synched to their phone automatically before you even get around to telling them that the old one is dead.
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I trust some of my friends with my phone and even my address, but not all, at least on FB. And I DON'T trust FB themnselves with my info.
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I tried putting up fake datas, but Facebook kicked me off. :(
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You are not required to put up much of anything besides your real name and a valid e-mail address (but even that you don’t have to share with anyone), as far as I can recall.
Pretty sure you could get away with using your last initial instead of the full name, but I could be wrong.
If you put up fake info, then yeah, you deserved to get the boot. Follow the rules.
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Well, MySpace, Friendster, etc. didn't boot me off for that.
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No, and MySpace also allowed all sorts of profile mods that turned it into a cancerous seizure-inducing cesspool. Facebook users are held to a slightly higher standard.
I can’t comment on Friendster, as I didn’t use it.
Get off my lawn (Score:2)
nothing to see here, move along.
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But thats all history now, i deleted my account properly. Now i get emails from programmer friends wanting me to join these "professional networks" type sites.
They got me... (Score:4, Funny)
That, or we don't give a shit. (Score:5, Interesting)
Hell, maybe we're _more_ careful about our personal info since facebook doesn't really have anything on it that we value.
Re:That, or we don't give a shit. (Score:5, Funny)
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What are these people going to find out... my hometown? My college? My favorite tv shows? Who cares?
Sounds like those questions the bank website asks me to prove I'm me...
web of trust (Score:2)
When posting things to facebook I usually limit pictures etc to "friends of friends". I like to think my friends are just as selective on who they add as friends as I am. The whole web-of-trust-thing.
By adding everyone you shred that web. Imagine someone stalking a friend of you. Instead of stalking him/her directly, they try to add friends from her friendlist to get close to him/her.
Adding people you don't know is stupid.
Promoters (Score:2, Informative)
Public Privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
If this trend is true, it points towards our "habituation" with the notion of the lack of privacy in our society. I think that along with the flood of information in our society comes the feeling that "all information should be freely available". People in general are becoming de-sensitized to this trend more and more, and expect more information about themselves to be available publicly. Not even just online - take a popular show like CSI. I think it's just sort of assumed that everyone is leaving this massive digital fingerprint behind them.
Spammers? (Score:4, Insightful)
Could it be that these befriendings are from people who don't care about privacy, or, put a better way, want to use Facebook to send spam messages, and so will befriend EVERYONE?
schemes (Score:1, Flamebait)
Im going to have to side with B3ttik on this one... most people dont give a shit. This the nature of social networking, and to be frank I think Facebook wants it that way. The more information that is exposed to the masses the more they can use for their massive data mining schemes. Its just one huge advertising machine.
Not in my experience (Score:2, Interesting)
FWIW.
Most of the "young" that I see on FB, e.g. my children, their friends, etc., have 200+ "friends."
Some of the !young that I see have 100+. I call them "friend collectors."
I personally only have about 50 (sucks to be me I guess). I don't send friend requests. I only accept friend requests from people I actually know.
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Privacy Settings (Score:1)
I just set up a group for "limited" access, so if someone friend requests me and I don't feel that I trust them I add them to the limited group right away (upon accepting them) and then they can only see a handful of things. If they turn out to be real people and I become friends with them outside of facebook, at a later point I could always remove them from the limited access group and they'll see what my normal friends see.
So yea, maybe I accepted more friend requests than the average kid (I consider mys
Skewed results... (Score:5, Funny)
I was running a similar experiment. And my pet cat Heisenberg befriended the Rubber Duck, a Nigerian prince, a Ukrainian boyband, and various sundry inanimate objects from other similar experiments.
Mobster (Score:1)
Will the rubber ducky help me with my mob? Or farm? Or ?
not for nothing... (Score:4, Insightful)
Random Friends (Score:1)
I have tons of random friends. Why? Because I use Facebook as a gaming site, rather than a friends site. The more 'friends' I have, the more powerful I am in the games. (Which is stupid, but that's the way they are written.) So I've got like 1000 'friends' on facebook about 10 in real life, plus family. Most of my 'friends' on facebook are the same way.
I don't post things on there that I don't want random strangers to see anyhow, so it's no big deal.
So if they didn't eliminate people like me from thei
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"Fake" accounts? (Score:2)
How does he know that all that "personal info" is real? I don't do "social networking" but it seems to me some might find it amusing to create an account with plausible but fake "personal info" and then "friend" away.
Purging my friend's list (Score:4, Insightful)
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You can do that to your friend's list? (Score:5, Funny)
Heck I've gone through my friend's list and purged out people I don't talk to or in other instances strongly dislike from way back in high school.
Personally, I think its irresponsible of your friend to have given you the kind of access necessary to remove people from his or her list.
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I must be in the minority.
According to the 'study', 41-46% of people accepted blindly, so you'd be in the majority.
- RG>
What planet are you sending this article from? (Score:2, Insightful)
The article seems lost entirely in its own little world and clueless whats going on. Facebook IS farmville, vampire wars, pet society, arena, etc. People join those groups, spam them for invites, and get invites in return to build up their game networks. I know one actual person in my list that doesnt do this, shes in high school and actually uses facebook to talk to her friends and complain about homework. Weirdo.
Now to discuss that people who play facebook shouldn't put too much personal information o
A duck is rather harmless... (Score:2, Interesting)
None of the photos we tag of him reveal his face - we find pictures of normal college activities (parties, football games, etc.) and tag a guy who's turned the wrong way, standing in the distance, or whatever. There are about 100 of these photos and none of them are of the same person.
I think he currently has
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It's scary, really. Imagine how easy it would be for a predator to create an online persona that is NORMAL? When this guy, who's status is regularly updated with lines such as "ayyy yo cause when i git crunk i like to toke...yaa digg??/? ahhaahaahh", is able to have even one successful conversation.
Heh I bet that fictional persona is far more interesting than me (or the average slashdotter I guess :P ) - I'm NOT able to get phone numbers or get to add "gurls" :P
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especially if they have at least one friend in common.
Hmm... I wonder if there’s a way to calculate the optimum approach vector, based on which of someone’s friends are likely to add you as a friend off-the-bat, which of them are likely to add you once you have a few friends in common, and how many friends in common you’ll need to have before you have a reasonable expectation of success when you attempt to friend the target?
O rly? (Score:2)
And in other news, older cars have more mileage than newer cars - update at 11!