Slashdot Mirror
Facebook ID Probe Shows Things Getting Worse
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.)"
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.
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
Keep in mind that the game itself still has access to all of your information. The Facebook terms of service prohibits the game from using or storing that information for anything not game-related, but there's nothing other than the honor system and Facebook's vague threats to occasionally enforce the rules that prevents it from doing so. The API itself will happily grant access to everything, whether the game needs it or not.
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.