Slashdot Mirror
Cybersquatting and Social Media
Earthquake Retrofit writes "Brian Krebs has a story about cybersquatting on social networking sites. He cites cases of people being impersonated and reports: 'A site called knowem.com allows you to see whether your name or whatever nickname you favor is already registered at any of some 120 social networking sites on the Web today. For a $64.95 fee, the site will register all available accounts on your behalf, a manual process that it says takes one to five business days. Whether anyone could possibly use and maintain 120 different social networking accounts is beyond my imagination. I would think an automated signup service like knowem.com would be far more useful if there was also a service that people could use to simultaneously update all of these sites with the same or slightly different content.' Is it time to saddle up for a new round of Internet land grabs?"
A Schneier blog post earlier this month pointed out a related story about how not establishing yourself on social sites, combined with the frequent lack of validation for friend requests, can provide identity thieves with a tempting target .
Many businesses currently use FaceBook and Twitter, and I would imagine the numbers will only increase. What it's 'meant' for often has little to do with how it will be used.
Even if businesses just watch for opinions and complaints, it's probably something worth their time.
The fact that some people need/want to be registered on 120 social networking sites at once means that something's horribly wrong here.
There should be a single social network that is flexible and open enough so that there's no need for any other one. In fact, there already is such a network. It is called the Internet.
We just need to utilize it the right way. Distributed social networking is the future, not a service that tries (and very probably fails) to manage your identity on 120 different centralized social networking services.
The fact that some people need/want to be registered on 120 social networking sites at once means that something's horribly wrong here.
I may only want one, but I might have friends scattered across, say, five of these. And I wouldn't want anyone to impersonate me on the 115 remaining sites.
There should be a single social network that is flexible and open enough so that there's no need for any other one. In fact, there already is such a network. It is called the Internet.
You don't want to be identified as yourself across the whole Internet. Trust me.
Someone is impresonating me on Facebook! I demand action!
Sincerely,
John Smith
I am not left-handed, either!
A word of caution: I used this service and Digg banned my account for "multiple accounts" since my account was created at the Knowem place along with other Knowem users' accounts.
All I wanted was one Digg account under my brand's trademark name and now that name is stuck with a disabled account.