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41% of Facebook Users Willing To Divulge Personal Info
plastick writes "In an experiment, 41% of Facebook users were willing to divulge highly personal information to a complete stranger. This according to IT security firm Sophos, which invited 200 randomly selected Facebookers to befriend a bogus Facebook user named 'Freddi Staur' (an anagram of 'ID Fraudster'). Of those queried, 87 responded to the invitation, among them 82 people whose profiles included personal information such as their email address, date of birth, address or phone number."
Yet ANOTHER story about how many Facebook users are not particularly interested in hiding personal information. I mean. come on! This is some sort of News Flash? Is anyone unaware that Facebook is primarily a platform for sharing personal information?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Freddie Saurus. Sounds like the name of kiddie dino character.
How much of that personal information was real and how much was made up?
"Willing to Divulge to" makes it sound like some complete stranger went on facebook and asked "Hey, give me your email address, blood type and shoe size" and got an answer.
What it really is, is that people add friends pretty randomly and openly, and many don't secure their personal information very well. In the ideal case you would have various 'grades' of friends which determine permissions but
a) Nobody would bother using it
b) Facebook doesn't particularly care about privacy.
Anyhoo, we knew all of this earlier - so non-story.
200 people can only represent so much.
personal information such as their email address, date of birth, address or phone number
I also have that information on my Facebook profile. It is available for ANYONE to see, including nonfriends.
I don't have a problem here - the problem lies with any bank who would consider that information to be "secret", and would allow someone to get a loan in my name with only that information.
Reading TFA I also conclude that
1. No indication how many of the 200 were active accounts or how they were chosen (there's a screenshot which to me suggests a clustering? 6 friends in london? What are the chances given the huge population of facebook users?)
2. They used a cartoon picture as a display image. If there was an uncertainty of whether you know this person, then the generic image wouldn't help either. If it was someone's real face you might get less people agreeing to friendship, probably.
Maybe they just don't consider things like that to be "highly personal". By default, most of that information is available by doing such mundane things as registering a domain name. I don't consider contact information to be "highly personal". Somebody younger than me who grew up with social networking is even less likely to.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
the issue is not the privacy.... it that i think that lots of users think that facebook was made for them. blame that on the "you are so special" parents...
Just because they accepted a friend request does not mean that they are willing to divulge personal information. They may not want to, but are simply uninformed about their privacy restriction settings. The data does not tell you anything about their willingness to divulge information. They may also have thought that they new the person. Lots of people exchange enough information to find someone of facebook when they're out partying and drunk, that they might accept just about any new requests the next day thinking it was someone they met the night before.
facebook, myspace everyone on there will tell you anything if you will read it... everyone is looking for there 5 minutes of fame.
Atlanta Movers
just look: http://www.sophos.com/images/misc/freddi_frog.jpg
Anyway, some issues:
A) Why such a small sample data? I mean, it shouldn't be hard to annoy 1000+ users instead of just 200.
B) Why aren't they talking about apps that access your information? I know you can disable them but, if you are willing to accept froggy here, I don't think you will.
The implications of the whole thing are hilarious:
Apparently, being poked by a Frog doesn't make you want to start a friendship. That could be a better title for the article.
http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/articles/2007/08/facebook.html
C) Next Survey: There's a pretty good chance that I'll waste valuable time with inconsequential Slashdot articles. But hey, It's good fun before going to sleep.
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
The heading, and a main talking point of TFA, suggest that, when asked, 41% of Facebook users will simply hand over personal information. But really what's shown is that about 44% of Facebook users will happily accept a random friend invitation and of those users more than 80% of them ALREADY HAD personal information posted on their profile. What does that tell us really?
It tells us that nearly all of the idiots on Facebook who are stupid enough to accept a friend invitation from a total stranger are ALSO stupid enough to post personal information in their profiles. Wow! 80+ percent of all Facebook idiots are really HUGE idiots! Amazing!
This way I can skip all these stories.
Isn't that the whole point of Facebook? ...to divulge personal information to all one's friends, and allowing strangers to also see it in case they happen to be long lost friends.
How many slashdotters will click this link
41% of facebook users are nasty spammers who waste all our taxmoney by keeping our fascist goverment busy with their pictures and comments... and their fucking traffic ruins torrent for everyone who is cool... :(
Only 41%?
That's better than I would have expected.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
the vast majority of people were not willing to divulge their private information.
"41% of Facebook Users Willing to Press a Button Without Understanding or Caring About the Consequences."
Let's just hope none of them end up in missile silos.
Yet Another Tech Blog
(but so much more, including game and movie reviews)
http://yanteb.peasantoid.org
Seriously slashdot?
I suspect that very soon "social networking" will be rechristened "social engineering network".
Here's to a society where we really don't care that our boss knows who we fucked this weekend and how drunk we were when we did it; here's to a society where the boss has something better to do than worry about how much he pisses me off, because I'm still performing and he's still bossing; here's to the New America.
This article was published in August 2007.
...and what percent of the remaining 59% who actually do care about hiding their phone number/street address bother to take it off sites like whitepages.com? I mean, my mom says that she will never put her street address on fb, yet has never attempted to remove it from whitepages.com
In terms of A), I suspect it has to do with being below the theoretical threshhold facebook might have for identifying scam users who are there to scrape information for profit/social engineering/other bad thing. Had they targeted 1000 a little bell might have gone off at facebook HQ before they had an adequate chance to actually look at what they'd managed to access.
I only friend people that I have met in real life, and with whom I wish to continue to have a friendship with.
I have de-friended many old high-school friends after deciding that I didn't want to bother 'restarting' a friendship after a decade. I have refused to 'friend' people I knew in college, even Fraternity brothers, because I simply didn't know them well enough to consider friends.
Finally, my Facebook account *DOES* have my birthday public, but the only 'contact' information on there at all is a 'throwaway' email address.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
"willing to divulge highly personal information to a complete stranger."
:p
I do this twice a month. It's called seeing a therapist.
It's not 41% of facebook Users. its 82 of 200 sampled users of the 600,000,000 users on facebook.
If you follow the link, you can see the data is quite old (http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20070814/facebook-privacy/ is dated August 14, 2007, as is http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/articles/2007/08/facebook.html). Ever thought what it would look like nowadays?
I think it would look different. I believe many users are more and more thinking about privacy, because many media stress privacy and expose the privacy problems concerning Facebook.
Just look for some more up-to-date data, then there will be something to discuss.
It this somehow related to the news that 50% of the population are below average?
Let's move on to Diaspora and beyond.
http://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox
Draw a normal curve of facebook users with IQ on the x axis and number of people on the Y axis. Now without thinking too hard, estimate the amount of people to the left of the peak in the curve. Approximately 50%. Wow - coincidence? Also for extra credit, quote that "correlation is not causation" to me to properly assign you your place on the curve.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Is your birthday also Jan 1, or did you pick a random date?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Wait a sec....
How come facebook doesn't terminate this bogus account, Freddi Staur, yet they happily terminate an account of a journalist in China for penning articles under a pseudonym. AND, they do so under the premise of a company policy that accounts must be established under a real name!!!
See article here, http://cpj.org/internet/2011/03/michael-antis-exile-from-facebook-over-real-name-p.php
Very hypocritical on Facebook's part that they do not enforce their policies uniformly.
Contact info != personal info.
My FB page contains my address, my phone and my email. As does the yellow pages. Duh.
If you're looking for sensitive info about me, you have to ask me. IRL. Unless you mean my political opinions, which are all over the place (I do consider them public, as I do consider myself living in a democracy, so far...)
email address, date of birth, address or phone number
This is highly personal information?
It always surprises me how little actually identification is required to pretend to be someone else.
I think most people would be surprised if they realised.
The problem comes in when they use this as a basis to say 41% of people don't care about privacy (rather than 41% of people ON Facebook are a little incautious about who they approve as friends)
I could actually see it being higher than that! 41 percent seems real, real low in my experience.
http://www.givejonadollar.com
the sophos research is from august 2007!!!!
Here in Sweden there is a site at birthday.se, where by typing a full name, you get information on home address (including the flat number) with link to a map, link to yellow pages with your home phone number, mobile number, etc, and of course the date of birth. Also they provide a service to show you who else is living on the same address, with their "highly personal" information. Very good to know who else is living on the same floor, to get a name of the spouse incl birthday and mobile phone number, etc... Then by doing some searching on the web, you could probably get the pictures of all the people on the floor, etc. The actual problem is not whether or not the information is considered "highly personal" by me, as much as by other people that are trusted with my personal info. After all, I deserve my own stupidity, but not the stupidity (or greed) of others...
B) Contacting 1000 people is 5 times as much work as contacting 200, yet the accuracy goes down as 1/sqrt(n), so with 1000 people you only halve the statistical error of 200. To improve the numbers by an order of magnitude, you typically have to multiply the sample size by a hundred. That's one hundred times more work.
If 41% of facebook users are divulging personal information to strangers without a care - the other 59% are doing it without knowing it...
Stuff like date of birth and address might be "highly personal", but it's not exactly confidential. The information is available from public records.
the 41% are just more stupid/careless/unthinking/trusting than the remaining 59%.
You can stop this terrible process by logging on to Face Book and by posting subversive lies that work to your advantage. I have been studying this site for a while and that is EXACTLY what everyone does. ...
Towards to Z OS CAPITAL LETTER REBELLION ...
The purpose of existence is to make money.
Speaking of which, regarding these kinds of surveys, doesn't that violate the Facebook terms of service?
And doesn't Facebook ask you to "verify" your acount ("for your protection", of course), like Paypal, after a while?
If so, how did they (the researchers) get a credit cart for Freddi Staur?
Not only that, but with breaking ToS also being a felony according to certain crazy legal jurisdictions, I don't know if it's a great idea to be telegraphing this research far and wide (as opposed to just saying "users of a popular social network").
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
...the figure is more like 95% -- every Facebook user who uses their real personal data (aka, everyone that is not a pedo and/or a slashdotter) is sharing their personal data. I know this because they are putting their personal data on Facebook, which is a fscking public forum.
I'm really getting tired of everyone complaining about Facebook not respecting users' privacy -- the whole point of the platform is to make information public. I have a Facebook page. I find it to be tremendously useful to me, but I don't ever put anything on there that I do not want publicly available.
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
The title should probably be '41% of Facebook users lonely'
Pretty much all of my friends have their birthday public.
I don't know about other countries, but in Canada that is very dangerous. It has been repeatedly shown with just your full name and birthday a fraudster can get just about any document they want issued.
Step 1: Ask government to reissue birth certificate.
Step 2: Use birth certificate to get SIN reissued.
Step 3: Use birth certificate and SIN to get drivers license reissued. (now featuring their picture, not yours)
Step 4: Take out multiple credit cards in your name, max them out on cash advances and high end electronics.
Step 5: They profit, you are probably really screwed.
All things are not equal:
email address, date of birth, address or phone number
So if I divulged "mythrowawayaddress@hotmail.com" I'm sharing highly personal information? How do you determine if an email is actually "highly personal?" Even if it's an ISP hosted address it could be a throwaway, and leads nowhere but a server. To a lesser extent, same goes for a phone number. Some people actually chuck a pre-paid in the garbage on a regular basis, you know. It's easy to have a throwaway phone number.
What qualifies as "highly personal" shouldn't be based on a standard set in 1994. The times have changed.
--
Toro
facebook business plan expects every user to share data, and no matter what they do to address privacy concerns, facebook's prime directive has nothing to do with protecting users' personal information. simply by joining facebook, you're agreeing to allow facebook and their advertisers to use your information. all facebook users are affected, not a tiny percentage.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
This just in:
Users Vastly More Cautious About Privacy Than Previous Generations
I'm told that a mere 20 years ago you could find out someone's phone number, home address, and sometimes even who they're married to using a complicated contraption commonly referred to as a "phone book". Not only that, but _everyone_ with a land line was included in these "books" by default! You had opt-out of having your personal information revealed.
There were even cases where thieves, murderers, rapists, and, yes, even child molesters would use this infinite and completely insecure trove of personal information to assist them in selecting or locating victims.
Find this story interesting? You may also be interested in the following:
The important question is: how many of those who answered to the invitation were hot comely girls?
I created a Facdebook page with deliberately misleading and contradictory information, and put on my Facebook page very clearly that this was designed to be misleading, just so Facebook wouldn't rely so much on its info to datamine. I asked a bunch of randomly selected total strangers to friend me on Facebook --and some did.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
I have thought about this but came up with a possible solution.
Do not create one profile for 1000+ users but create 5 different profiles for 200 users each. The variety might even provide an opportunity to rectify wrong conclusions.
It's a valid point, nevertheless.
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
I think the issue is two-fold:
1). Facebook users are not aware how much information they are sharing when they do something as simple as adding a friend (after all, isn't this the point of social networks?)
2). Many people don't care about the personal information being released. I've found that in real-life, people are more than willing to give away their phone number, e-mail, name, and birthday in all sorts of situations where it's not necessary or even on a casual whim from another. The average person doesn't consider these very important (in terms of keeping secret or minimizing exposure), unlike say Social Security Numbers.
The point is, some of it is ignorance, but plenty of it is just an apathetic attitude to sharing the information.
It seems to me that most people using Facebook don't know that their phone and address info is shared w/ their "friends". I'm pretty paranoid about that stuff and didn't know until I stumbled on the address book feature which wasn't too obvious on a computer be easy to find on the iphone/pod app.
Luckily for me I never put that kind of info in there anyway and had already gone through the security settings to turn off sharing of most things and made my profile private to non-friends.
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)