Elliott Rodgers

Few people can have missed that Facebook is implementing Facial Recognition. There seems to be a lot of people who are deeply unhappy with this latest development and what it means for privacy. I’ve had a ponder about this and I’m not actually that worried about it. Google’s free photo editing software has had facial recognition for a two or three years now (I think it was included about September 2008~ish).

I don’t tend to go out and get drunk enough that I don’t know what I’m doing (I do like the occasional beer or cider though), I don’t take recreational drugs, I’m not into causing chaos, having a punch up or other anti social behaviour. There’s not that many photos of me around (since I hate having my photo taken) and certainly no photographs floating around which I wouldn’t be prepared to show the world. If people wanted to see photo of me a Google Image Search will turn up some!

If someone has a photo of me and my face is identified tagging me, great that’s another photo of me for my profile. I have plenty of friends who’d tag me anyway! One thing I don’t understand about people who complain about privacy being invaded etc when it comes to Facebook if you don’t like the way Facebook manages the privacy of members – then don’t use Facebook. It’s not compulsary after all.

Judging by responses on blogs, news sites etc I think I may be an exception.

There are a number of scams going around at Facebook at the moment.

One that is travelling at super speed is one of the survey scams which claims to show rollercoaster footage of an accident, various titles including the accident happening in UK, California or Australia. If you agree to add the application it blasts out a dozen or so copies to random members on your friends list. There has also been suggestions that it also carries a virus. More on this scam can be found at Facecrooks

Roller Coaster Scam

Be careful out there.

As I’ve mentioned before never give “correct” answers to password security questions and never use obvious passwords. Those with ill intent can will scan Facebook profiles etc to try and find the answers to security questions like favourite colour; mother’s maiden name. If they gain access to your email account, they can they gain access to all sorts of things and cause massive amounts of problems. So use a strong password and don’t have anything obvious as the answer to a question that resets the password.

Anyone who doubts the scale of the problem, well maybe everyone should read this article at The Register – Man nabbed nude pics from women’s email accounts (the same man was also found to be in possesion of the very worst kind of child pornography).

The offical press release can be found at State of California – Attorney General’s Office. (The SoC AG Office also provide copies of the arrest warrant – it makes for horrific reading; don’t read it unless you have a strong stomach)

A couple of friends have approached me and asked for advice on the latest scam that seems to be doing the rounds on Facebook.

A scammer approaches someone often as they’ve been in the same Facebook group, puts in a friend request. After a couple of days of adding bits on your Facebook wall then chats randomly for a few minutes on Facebook Chat and then asks them if they can complete a survey… All nice and friendly so far… survey asks all the usual questions then they’ll be a section of the survey on pets, asking what pets you’ver owned etc all getting you primed for a question hidden amongst other questions “What did you call you’re first pet?” As it all looks safe, fairly normal and most people answer surveys truthfully the person answers honestly.

“What’s your first pet’s name? ” isn’t a very innocent question however. It’s used as a security question on a wide range of services including e-mail providers. Combine this answer with an email address and someone can very quickly and easily gain access to your emails. Sounds like a bit of a disaster. Everyone’s got a few emails they’d rather keep private.

However once someone has your email address they can then click on the helpful little “forgot your password” links on various sites answer the question “Your First Pets Name?” correctly and get a reset sent to your email address. They are in another part of your life. Potentially worse they can impersonate you and email all your contacts and ask them to complete the same survey! Once they are into your FaceBook, Windows Messenger, MySpace, Twitter accounts or similar they can impersonate you and message all your friends to complete the same survey.

Once inside an email account they can potentially order themselves products at sites where you store credit card details to save having to re enter them. Lots of people save receipts and order confirmation emails which scammers will use to find out what sites you are using once inside your email.

Be wary of people suddenly asking you to fill out surveys and never answer truthfully any question which could reveal answers to Security Questions on another site. On a side note: Nothing says your answer to a security question has to be valid – why not answer “First Pets Name? ” with a random word… but don’t use rainbow as that’s what I use…. (that’s a joke by the way!)

Every so often one of people on my Facebook friends list joins a group with a title along the lines of Facebook to start charging $5.99 a month from 1st July 2010 join to say no.

The case against Facebook charging

Facebook won’t start charging, ever. It would be business suicide.

Facebook revenue comes from selling advertising, targeted with surgical precision. Targeted using information supplied by users; sex, age, location, interests etc. When I split up with Rachel and changed my relationship status to single, Facebook was immediately offering dating sites and advertisements. Users can even flag an advertisement as irrelevant effectively further targeting the ad. With around 400 million users, half logging in every day, even if users only viewed one profile page on that daily login it would mean 600 million ad views a day! Facebook is set to make half a billion US$ a year in 2010, you’d have to be severely insane to risk alienating your customer base with half a billion pounds of revenue and those ad revenues.

Facebook already announced way back in May last year on the Facebook blog that they are NOT planning on charging.

So why do these rumours keep surfacing?

Just because lots of people keep claiming something is true, doesn’t make it so, even on the internet. These groups are created with the specific intent of doing everything they can to get as many people to join the group as possible (hence the provocative group names), once they have enough members someone will start dropping in spam messages to make some dollars.

If a group has 100,000 members and 1% of people follow up on a spam ad yielding a US$0.50 return that’s $5,000. Not bad for quarter of an hours work and a few posts of Facebook to keep it looking legitimate. The same person often creates a dozen of these groups at a time. There’s no advertising cost involved for the scammers apart from their time. The irony of it all is that as more people sign up they keep promoting the group making it get ever bigger.

Just to give you an idea of real numbers, I’ve seen one group with 650,000 members and at least twenty spam ads. (Based on the equation above that’s US$130,000!!)