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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.)"
Good. Let Facebook go the way of the dodo. It's the equivalent of those "personal home pages" people put up when they first discovered the Web.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
From TFS: "The older users had more than 4x the friends each, on average, than the young."
They've also had a lifetime of real life social networking (not the online kind) to boost the level of friends and acquaintances they would like to keep in contact with.
Young people are very cliquey with their behaviour in regards to friends. When I was in school, I could've counted my true friends on my fingers. When I went out into the world and bounced jobs for a couple years, I met many more interesting people that I remained friends with after the jobs had come and gone.
Also, do we really need another article to tell us that the older people in society are less hip to the social network scams?
I'm thinking that a lot of people add folks they don't know into their friends' pile for the applications, esp. games. After all, Mafia Wars and the like are rigged to get you more in-game "power" (more defense, offense, etc) with the larger number of friends you add (and then subsequently add into your "Mafia", or "Neighbors", or "Crew").
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
How about not putting stuff up on social media sites that you wouldn't want posted on a bulletin board at the local laundromat? Why on earth would I post my DOB, address, phone number there for example??
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
That's why I don't use my real contact info for my Mafia Wars account . . . I'm not sure why anyone would.
If this trend is true, it points towards our "habituation" with the notion of the lack of privacy in our society. I think that along with the flood of information in our society comes the feeling that "all information should be freely available". People in general are becoming de-sensitized to this trend more and more, and expect more information about themselves to be available publicly. Not even just online - take a popular show like CSI. I think it's just sort of assumed that everyone is leaving this massive digital fingerprint behind them.
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
Could it be that these befriendings are from people who don't care about privacy, or, put a better way, want to use Facebook to send spam messages, and so will befriend EVERYONE?
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
not for nothing...but you're doing a study of 200 people on a network of 350 million...kind of small study...
I don't have time to waste keeping one account up to date. I can't image keeping track of two. When do you find time to code, hack, and generally do geeky stuff?
FreeBSD.org - The power to serve
I must be in the minority. If I don't know a person I won't add them as a friend. Heck I've gone through my friend's list and purged out people I don't talk to or in other instances strongly dislike from way back in high school. I also don't play Mobwars or Farmville which is just a needless waste of time. I avoid them because I would become engrossed in it.
The article seems lost entirely in its own little world and clueless whats going on. Facebook IS farmville, vampire wars, pet society, arena, etc. People join those groups, spam them for invites, and get invites in return to build up their game networks. I know one actual person in my list that doesnt do this, shes in high school and actually uses facebook to talk to her friends and complain about homework. Weirdo.
Now to discuss that people who play facebook shouldn't put too much personal information on their profile is a decent topic. But dont come at it so naive.
I still don't understand what the big deal is about finding someone's address and phone number.
Back in Ye Olden Days, when people had telephones that were plugged into walls, all this information was printed in large books distributed free to every customer.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
"older users had more than 4x the friends each, on average, than the young" - true that for some, it may be eagerness to build up the friends list, but for many of us, just having family members makes for a lot of 'friends'. I have my wife, two children, my brother and sister and their kids, my Uncle and his kids and some of his grandkids, I have my other uncle and his kids... so, as you get older, the family tree keeps expanding, and the friends list grows... you have to worry when the list shrinks due to attrition!!!