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41% of Facebook Users Willing To Divulge Personal Info

Posted by samzenpus on from the do-you-need-my-social-security-number? dept.

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."

28 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. Again? by Frosty+Piss · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

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    If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
    1. Re:Again? by One+Louder · · Score: 5, Informative

      Apparently, it *was* a News Flash back in 2007 when this article was written.

    2. Re:Again? by underqualified · · Score: 2

      samzenpus might have forgotten the "new" in "news for nerds"

      good catch, sir.

    3. Re:Again? by AvitarX · · Score: 2

      My name is 100% unique in this country (and likely the world), anybody who has my name has that info. I hardly feel concern.

      There was a time almost every phone number and address was public (white pages), a birthday is hardly secret knowledge too, and really who the fuck cares about an e-mail address.

      None of these things are meaningful.

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    4. Re:Again? by Rubinstien · · Score: 2

      Perhaps they are not meaningful to you. Personally, I pay to keep my telephone number *out* of the white pages, and divulge none of the other information to anyone other than my employer, my bank, some creditors, and a few real-life friends. I don't want *anyone* else to have it. I'm inclined to send nasty-grams to HR when they voluntarily give away my work email address to 'corporate perks' programs and 'employee health' organizations. I get almost zero personal spam but average five a day for my work address.

      Facebook still manages to piss me off. I moved a couple of years ago, and made the mistake of giving my real email address to the realtor who was supposed to sell my old house. He ended up sending me an invite to friend him on Facebook. I do not have (or want) a Facebook account, but they now have my email address because of this dufus. Worse, I then started getting spam from Facebook, with these little icons of photos of people I 'might know'. Actually, I did know about 4 out of 5 of them. This indicates two things to me: 1) These people have poked around on Facebook to see if I am there; and 2) Facebook maintains these searches in a damned database. So, whether you 'opt in' to this or not, your associations are tracked and cataloged for their future use. I no longer have that email address. I terminated it last year because it is now useless to me.

      For what it is worth, I spent a couple of years where part of my job was doing merges of various targeted mailing lists to make even more targeted mailing lists. At one point, we had a doctor paying us to identify unwed mothers. Most people would be amazed at the information that falls out when you start tying different mailing lists together -- everything from magazine subscription lists, to stores you have purchased things from, to club and organization membership lists. All for sale. All very useful. Want to make a statistically valid guess at someone's gender preference? It isn't difficult, and I expect you will be able to purchase such information on line in the near future (you can probably do so already, but I haven't looked into it).

      In summary, it is true that what Facebook is doing is not unique, it is just a new dimension (web of associations between persons) added to already available information (web of associations to organizations). On that point I would agree. I disagree that this is not meaningful. It all depends on how creative you are at cross-referencing. An email-address, in particular, is *very* valuable in this regard -- better than a physical address for some things.

  2. Was it real by slashqwerty · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "82 people whose profiles included personal information such as their email address, date of birth, address or phone number."

    How much of that personal information was real and how much was made up?

    1. Re:Was it real by davester666 · · Score: 2

      I knew he wasn't born in the US. He's not even a resident!

      --
      Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
    2. Re:Was it real by Zemran · · Score: 4, Funny

      I always use 1-1-1980, the date that BIOS used to reset to when the battery went flat on a motherboard.

      --
      I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
  3. Misleading Title by Haedrian · · Score: 4, Informative

    "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.

    1. Re:Misleading Title by formfeed · · Score: 2

      "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.

      Isn't that how it pretty much is? Or are you friends with Zuckerberg?

    2. Re:Misleading Title by Sir_Sri · · Score: 2

      It also wrongly supposes that all of that information is necessarily private. My full name, address, phone number, e-mail address are already public whether I like it or not as part of working for the government and the information it makes available, as it does the government portion of my income.

      I'm not 100% sure on my date of birth, so I wouldn't include that necessarily, but I'm pretty sure it's public too.

      And I'm in ontario and make 22k a year as a grad student. People who make 100k a year have their salary published in a giant list and have since 1996, which, along with their work profiles (including phone numbers and e-mail addresses), and your actual address in the phone book.

      So why is any of that public? Well name, work e-mail, work phone, we all are supposed to have webpages with that info on them.. Salary, well that can be reconstructed because our contracts are public, and you know when I was hired, under what contract. So give or take 500 bucks you know my salary pretty trivially. Address, date of birth are all public, if somewhat buried, in records about enrollment (ages of entering students, ages of leaving students, geographic distribution of applicants etc.), and if you make over 100k a year that's pretty much plastered out there by the government on it's sunshine list anyway.

      So if someone actually knows my name, it's not all that hard to figure out any of that information. Facebook may put it in one place, but for a lot of us, especially if our facebook profile is intentionally set to public, there's nothing there that cannot be gleamed from our corporate webpages too.

  4. Well.. by meowris · · Score: 2

    200 people can only represent so much.

  5. This information isn't private by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:This information isn't private by Ndkchk · · Score: 2

      The mistake would lie with the bank, but if they were to give a loan in your name to anyone with that information, you would indeed have a problem.

  6. Highly personal? by Bogtha · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
  7. I wouldn't mind giving my info to him, he's cute by Isaac+Remuant · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  8. The point of Facebook by LongearedBat · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  9. An experiment... by tuxrocks1 · · Score: 3, Funny

    How many slashdotters will click this link

  10. A Better Headline by Ltap · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "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.

    --
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    (but so much more, including game and movie reviews)
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  11. This article is four years old. by Krystalo · · Score: 5, Informative

    This article was published in August 2007.

  12. Well by jav1231 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "willing to divulge highly personal information to a complete stranger."

    I do this twice a month. It's called seeing a therapist. :p

  13. You mean 82 people? by cliath · · Score: 2

    It's not 41% of facebook Users. its 82 of 200 sampled users of the 600,000,000 users on facebook.

  14. Re:Anyway... by Culture20 · · Score: 2

    Maybe the 41% were all ID Fraudsters too, and they welcome anyone who befriends them?

  15. Re:misleading headline by hedwards · · Score: 2

    I don't use facebook, the but implications of any particular setting are changing rapidly, I can't blame people for not understanding the settings. I can however blame them for being associated with that site, the one which feels the need to stalk random people on the net with their accursed like buttons.

  16. Highly personal? yeah right... by prcko · · Score: 2

    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...

  17. Actually... by thisnamestoolong · · Score: 2

    ...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.

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  18. headline incorrect? by mAineAc · · Score: 2

    The title should probably be '41% of Facebook users lonely'

  19. Happy Birthday by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.