Robert Siciliano Identity Theft Expert
Danger!! How’s that for a blog title that screams fear, uncertainty and doubt!? Fact is Facebook boast 400 million users and is in so many ways seems out of the control of its founder, and is looking dangerous. This is a company that has grown faster than fast and has a (very intelligent) 20 something CEO just out of puberty calling the shots. It seems the amount they (his Board? CIO? ) lets him run at the mouth that privacy is no big deal, shows an immature lack of control over this operation. Any company that wields this much power needs to be checked and balanced.
Their growing pains are publicly played out in numerous lawsuits and visceral rants by every possible pundit (like me) and privacy professional on the block.
Sure when you are that big there will always be someone who wants to take you down. But every week there is a new story about a security breach or a privacy violation. That tells me it’s more than growing pains or jealousy. There are serious management problems there resulting in reputation issues for the company and for the user, security issues.
DANGER, DANGER!
The 3rd party applications in the form of games and quizzes are sharing data that’s not meant to be shared. While the user may agree to the terms of service, they aren’t reading the fine print. Is it really in Facebook’s interest to allow this?
Seems like every 2 weeks they change whatever privacy settings there are and the public gets more pissed off with each change. Why doesn’t someone inside this company have a clue what the public wants? What’s more obvious is they don’t care!
Criminals and scammers set up fake profiles of companies and individuals all day every day. These social media identity theft profiles are designed to get people to provide data for free gift cards or other offers that ultimately allow for financial fraud to occur. Is there no way they can more effectively police this?
Recently, the chat feature was made public. For a period of time users chats were available for anyone to see. They had to shut it down to calm the mess. How the heck does that happen? Don’t they have redundancy built in to prevent this?
Ads appearing on Facebook are sanctioned in some way by Facebook and some are malicious. When clicked they can infect your PC. You would think that a private company worth billions would have systems in place to prevent its users from getting hacked via ads placed on their own servers?
So now that I’m done throwing up, protect your identity. Because when it gets hacked on Facebook, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Invest in Intelius identity theft protection and prevention. Not all forms of identity theft can be prevented, but identity theft protection services can dramatically reduce your risk. (Disclosures)
Robert Siciliano Identity Theft Speaker discussing Facebook Hackers on CNN.
3 users commented in " Beware of Facebook Dangers "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackMy company just launched a website that offers VERY low cost security software that provides protection from malware attacks on social networking sites.
We tried contacting Facebook for over a YEAR about our security software and they have never responded. It’s obvious FB doesn’t care about security. They seem to be focused on “privacy” because people are screaming about it.
So readers, protect yourself given none of the social networking sites can provide “security”. It’s sad these sites care more about getting millions of users than ensuring subscribers are safe from malware attacks.
So check out our new website: http://www.SecureMySocialNetworking.com and let us know what you think.
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Read 8 times. Robert Siciliano Identity Theft Expert Danger!! How’s that for a blog title that screams fear, uncertainty and doubt!? Fact……
Very interesting article. I have been looking at dangers before I let my children on Facebook and your story highlights my concerns. Sean Thibodeau also has an interesting article about Facebook dangers at his site.
http://suspiciouspackaging.blogspot.com/2010/08/facebook-good-bad-and-ugly.html
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