Deleted Your Facebook Account? Think Again

Via BoingBoing - if you think that deleting your Facebook account makes it go away, think again.

Jason Calacanis deleted his, but it didn't disappear. The reason? If third-party sites like Twitter or YouTube make updates to your account within 14 days of you closing it, Facebook resets the process.

Hard to believe people are finally pushing back on this just because Facebook isn't doing what you think they're doing.

EFF - Six Things to Know About Facebook Connections

Each time Facebook makes a change to their privacy practices, it pisses me off a little bit more.

So you can guess how infuriated I was when I learned about "Connections", and I immediately deleted several sections of my information.

But was it enough?

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, probably not.

1. Facebook will not let you share any of this information without using Connections.
2. Facebook will not respect your old privacy settings in this transition.
3. Facebook has removed your ability to restrict its use of this information.
4. Facebook will continue store and use your Connections even after you delete them.
5. Facebook sometimes creates a Connection when you "Like" something
6. Facebook sometimes creates a Connection when you post to your wall.

Facebook, I've given it a shot, but the truth is, I'm just not that into you.

Full disclosure - I'm an EFF member and contributor.

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Opt Out of Facebook's 'Instant Personalization'

Facebook is up to their old privacy tricks again.

This time the "feature" is Instant Personalization, a quaint moniker that fuzzes the fact that the sites you visit and interact with might suddenly be broadcast for everyone to see, even if you unselect the box to participate.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation elaborates:

More specifically, these sites "may access any information you have made visible to Everyone ... as well as your publicly available information. This includes your Name, Profile Picture, Gender, Current City, Networks, Friend List, and Pages." On Monday, Facebook announced a transition where a "new type of Facebook Page" will make the "current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests sections of your profile" publicly available after you go through the transition tool (or those items will be deleted).

By default, the "Allow" checkbox for Instant Personalization is checked on your privacy settings. If you don't want the websites that you or your Facebook friends visit to know your information, you must opt out. Since this process is a bit complicated, we have made a quick video showing step by step how to do so.

Thankfully, EFF has put together a handy video that helps walk folks through not only opting out of this new feature, but specifically blocking the three applications that are currently participating.

The downside is that there's no easy way to automatically block new sites as they begin to participate, so bookmark the help page demonstrated in the video and check back from time to time in order to manually block additional apps as they come online.

IKEA Gift Card Scam Snares Facebook Users

On a single day last week, 40,000 Facebook users fell victim to an online scam promising $1,000 IKEA gift cards.

In March of 2010, a similar scam took in more than 70,00 victims. Perhaps things in Farmville are too expensive?

Are Facebook users more naive than the general population, or are they so used to over-sharing everything that it's impossible for them to discern fact from fiction?

The lofty goal of those perpetrating these frauds is two-fold: steal your personal information for later use in identity theft, and direct you toward sites that surreptitiously install malicious software on your computer that captures your keystrokes, steals  your information, or becomes part of a massive botnet used to launch spam blizzards or churn out malware itself.

It's really a matter of Psychology 101 - giving people an incentive to engage in risky behavior and using human nature to help them make terrible choices. Remember the story of the trojan horse?

Don't accept friend requests from people that you don't know well. Don't mindlessly click on offers and links that people send you. And remember this scam advice that's been floating around as long as there's been fraud: if it looks to be too good to be true, it probably is.

Via Network World

Facebook's FarmVille: Fertile Fraud Terrain

More than 75 million Oliver Douglas wanna-bes play FarmVille, making it the most popular game application on Facebook. But it's possible that something smells, and it's not virtual manure.

The dangers of apps like FarmVille and Mafia Wars were part of a larger discussion of the perils of social networking at the 2010 ShmooCon security conference. As more people gravitate toward sites like Facebook and Twitter, both locations become target-rich environments for malware authors and those seeking to abscond with your personal information for fraudulent purposes.

If your aunt or nephew can't figure out how to post a picture on their wall, what confidence do you have that they have correctly configured their sharing and privacy preferences for optimal protection?

More to the point, how likely are they to click on a bit.ly link provided by a "friend" that purports to be an official update or better yet, tips or tricks, or the latest information on how to score unlimited "farm coins"?

From ComputerWorld:

"Facebook has 350 million users with 12 million logging in daily. Twitter is getting 6.2 million new users a month. The target base keeps growing," said Eston, a penetration tester for a Fortune 500 financial services organization.

In one of their more colorful examples, the trio explained how actress Jessica Biel is the most dangerous woman on the Internet because of all the fake profiles of her scattered throughout the social networking landscape.

People on Twitter are easily duped into thinking Biel is following them in Twitter. The Facebook folks proudly count her among their friends, not realizing the page is really under the control of a malicious operator who wants you to click on malicious links on the page.

We would all like to think that Jessica Biel is following us, rather than the other way around (stupid restraining order!). But let's be honest - she's just not that into you. But Russian organized crime members are, and they have all sorts of sites they want you to visit with your unpatched Windows laptop with outdated antivirus software running Internet Explorer 6. Oh yes.

Why do people rob banks? Because that's where the money is.

Why do fraudsters frequent Facebook? Because that's where the low-hanging fruit is.

You've been warned.

Image via Wikipedia

Facebook Privacy - In Bizarro World

Via The Joy of Tech

Month of Facebook Flaws

Picking up H.D. Moore's "Month of...." targeted vulnerability reporting mantle, a security researcher has vowed to spend the month of September 2009 disclosing a series of cross-site scripting vulnerabilities affecting various Facebook applications.

Hold on to your hats, boys and girls.

theharmonyguy plans to give Facebook web developers 24 hours notice before publicly disclosing the flaws. If you're smart, you'll buy some stock in Code Red and pizza delivery, because there are some coders who will be spending some late nights recompiling and testing their web apps over the next couple of weeks.

There have already been a couple of applications called out for their weaknesses - FarmVille for one. If you're using it, you're at risk until it's fixed.

Link to full article on The Register

Image by pshab via flickr

You Want To Be My Friend On Facebook?

Are you fucking kidding me?

Wife Has Face Used in Facebook Hot Singles Ad

I've always found that the amount of hot singles in my area expressing interest in a middle-aged, balding, overweight man tends to be pretty much nonexistent, but that doesn't stop social networking sites from serving those ads up to me anyway, obviously hoping that I click through and generate a little revenue. I never do, but I admire their tenacity.

A Lynchburg, VA man found himself in a similar situation, one that he would similarly ignore, except for one detail - the face in the advertisement that popped up on Facebook belonged to someone he knew.

His wife.

Facebook has long been a privacy punching bag, and for good reason. The breadth and depth of data they capture about users and their usage history is staggering, and how that information is used (and abused) is well documented.

Cheryl Smith's picture had been used to generate the ad after it was captured by a third party that was cranking out advertising for Facebook, who claimed that the company had violated its' policies in how the whole thing transpired. But it does bring up an interesting point. With millions of us posting our pictures on the web these days, what's to keep any of us from becoming an unwitting model for some online dating service? And what if our spouses don't have the same sense of humor and level of trust as Cheryl's?

In this case, even if you implemented the granular privacy settings that Facebook provides, you wouldn't have been protected in all cases. Third party applications that you use via Facebook aren't always covered by the privacy toggles. Sleep on that, people.

Surprise! Wife's face used in Facebook singles ad , via The Red Tape Chronicles

Foray into Facebook

I've been holding off venturing into the social networking sites for a couple of reasons.

First, they have a seedy history of scary privacy practices with terms of service that either change noxiously with little warning, or give away the personal information farm as a matter of course.

Secondly, social networking sites are surpassed as locations for phishing, social engineering, links to malware-loaded locations, and other sundry evils only by porn sites and web urls that offer freebies of some sort.

With many friends (real ones, not just social networking friends) already on "The Facebook", as I like to call it, I decided to take the plunge and set myself up an account, the thought being that I could use it as another avenue to drive traffic to Red Gecko. There's only so much Digg and Reddit can do for a fellow, y'know?

So as we begin this adventure, I'm keeping an open mind about where this may go. Already, my Facebook friend list is a mixture of actual friends that I speak with regularly and high school classmates that I haven't seen or talked with in (exactly) 30 years. That strikes me as kind of odd.

Shouldn't there be something in the middle? Maybe people I worked with in 1994, or Army buddies I haven't seen since taking off the pickle suit in 1982. Perhaps some of the scores of folks I incarcerated during my 15 years of corporate investigation, or a trio from Microsoft engineer school.

I'm at the tail end of the Boomer generation, probably the dividing line between people who remember 5 channel television and leaded gasoline, at the crossroads where if you're on one side of the street you need your kids to help you program that newfangled VCR, and if you're on the other, like me, you have your own data center in an downstairs office and pre-ordered the new iPhone 3G S because you wanted to have it last Friday but there was no way you were going to stand in line outside of an Apple retail store with those idiots that slept on the sidewalk the night before.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

We'll see how the whole privacy thing progresses, too. I'm a little disconcerted that I can see pictures and wall writings from friends of friends of friends, and frankly, I'm sometimes disinterested in the things that I write, let alone missives coming from 16 degrees of separation away. And I'll let Gmail deal with the flood of spam that gets generated as the result of the harvesting bots roaming through the Facebook site.

I'll probably use Facebook mostly to be an instigator, a talent long held but with endless possibilities in electronic mediums. At Red Gecko, you've made an effort to come read my words, so you deserve whatever you get. On Facebook, I can sneak up behind someone who doesn't even know me and annoy by proxy.

Oh, the places I'll go.