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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.)"
...the younger members just need more time to make friends!
I use Facebook to let members of the forum know if there's a server problem. Most of my 50 or so friends are from the forum with my Facebook Forum page at something over 100 fans. I set up a filter so I can filter out the forum members and get updates from friends and the sites I'm a fan of.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
I personally have 2 accounts. I use one strictly for games where I will accept any and all takers. I post to lists to increase my numbers and can see from 20 to hundreds of requests per day. That account has no real data.
My other REAL account only has REAL friends and Family. I scrutinize every request and all personal settings are very tight as to only allow friends to see the data. I'd consider myself an 'older' user @ +40. From what I have seen, this is not uncommon.
I'd probably accept anyone who cares enough to "friend" me, whether I know them or not. Mark me in the 43.5%, a guy who once accepted a friend request from "Some Pencils" and a random girl in Arizona (thousands of miles from me) just because she was a girl. What are these people going to find out... my hometown? My college? My favorite tv shows? Who cares? I don't think I'm really stalker material, and iIf my favorite movies are that important to some guy writing a corporate spambot, whatever, he can have it. He can't even find my address or my phone number on facebook, two things I consider more personal, and _those_ you can already find in any phonebook site.
Hell, maybe we're _more_ careful about our personal info since facebook doesn't really have anything on it that we value.
FWIW.
Most of the "young" that I see on FB, e.g. my children, their friends, etc., have 200+ "friends."
Some of the !young that I see have 100+. I call them "friend collectors."
I personally only have about 50 (sucks to be me I guess). I don't send friend requests. I only accept friend requests from people I actually know.
Well, this is based on a completely unscientific poll of my brain cells, but it seems older users would be more likely to, at least initially, treat sites like Facebook as something new to just try out, a fun toy more than a serious part of their lives, and thus less likely to care that much about how they expose themselves on such a site.
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.
Does that actually work at the moment? A few months ago myself and a friend had a play with those features and no matter what settings he used I kept being able to see everything I could before we started. Admittedly we didn't report the issues nor have we bothered re-testing (so maybe our experience is just a fluke or a temporary issue at the time).
Welcome to our minority. My personal filter is that if I wouldn't feel comfortable approaching them randomly to strike up a conversation then they shouldn't be on my list. There's lots of people from high school I denied because I didn't talk to them then, what's changed? Just because we knew 'of' each other it doesn't mean we need to put on a fake smile and pretend we were all buddy buddy.
None of the photos we tag of him reveal his face - we find pictures of normal college activities (parties, football games, etc.) and tag a guy who's turned the wrong way, standing in the distance, or whatever. There are about 100 of these photos and none of them are of the same person.
I think he currently has more Facebook friends than I do. Girls will constantly accept his friend requests, especially if they have at least one friend in common. Each time we chat with someone we use his created persona and 99% of the people never call us out on not being a real person. I can't count the number of times a girl has accepted an invitation such as the following:
"heeay gurl u comin 2 ma paaartay?"
We've acquired dozens of numbers (never used, obviously) and made vague promises to meet up with these girls.
It's scary, really. Imagine how easy it would be for a predator to create an online persona that is NORMAL? When this guy, who's status is regularly updated with lines such as "ayyy yo cause when i git crunk i like to toke...yaa digg??/? ahhaahaahh", is able to have even one successful conversation.